At CSD, we believe that assessment should be done in the service of learning and should inform educators' decisions about their next instructional steps for their students.  While we feel that standardized testing has a place in the overall educational system, we do not put a great deal of emphasis on high stakes standardized testing in particular as it only represents a snapshot in time of a child's learning.  Our approach is to teach a high quality, hands-on curriculum all year long, and then six weeks before the End-of-Grade tests, we review the course content and teach our students the "genre" of test-taking as a life skill.  The rest of the school year, we use multiple methods of assessing students' understanding and strive to keep the love of learning alive as we focus on mastery learning.