Are These Children from Lake Wobegon?

Are These Children from Lake Wobegon?

by Betsy Hill

A little over a week ago, I was in Canada – Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. to be exact. It was excruciatingly cold, of course, but that’s not why I was thinking of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. The reason I was thinking of Lake Wobegon is that I was remembering the way he closes his Prairie Home Companion show by stating that all of the children in Lake Wobegon are above average. And the reason that I was in Sault Ste Marie was to share with a school district how the 3rd grade students who used BrainWare SAFARI last year went from pretty much average performance on cognitive tests to way better than average, and how their academic achievement soared as well.

The students who used BrainWare SAFARI in the fall of the 2013-14 school year, had overall scores on the CCAT (the Canadian Cognitive Abilities Test) that were 32 percentile points higher than at the beginning of the year, resulting in 50% of the students scoring at the 70th percentile or above. At the 70th percentile and above, students are able to thrive in academic work. Below that, they are likely to need some additional support to reach grade-level expectations. In fact student performance improved across the spectrum of abilities, as we have seen in numerous prior studies in the U.S. with the CogAT, the U.S. counterpart to the CCAT). Remarkably, immediately after using BrainWare SAFARI, 70% of students were above the national average. It sounds a little like Lake Wobegon, doesn’t it?

Often in education, we are in the position of assuming that children arrive in our classrooms with all of the cognitive equipment they need or will ever have. We need to understand that cognitive ability is something we can actually help students develop. Shouldn’t every student have an opportunity to be “above average,” as in Lake Wobegon?