Kaplan K12 Learning Services
By Mitchell Levine

When I was a high school student in the 1980s, the name “Kaplan” was virtually synonymous with SAT preparation. With over three million students served in thousands of classrooms around the world, it’s not hard to understand why this image continues to dominate the organization’s public perception.

Coaching students for college admissions examinations, however, is only a small part of the services Kaplan, Inc. provides not only to those striving to enter higher education, but to educators looking for tools to help maximize their students’ ability.

Education professionals might not be as familiar with the complete extent of the Kaplan K12 Learning Services. The company provides in–school workshops at the elementary, middle-school, and high-school levels for state-mandated assessments. It also provides the possibility for complete custom program development.

A concrete demonstration of Kaplan’s philosophy can be found in its print guides for teachers, such as its Test Strategies series, available in editions appropriate for various grade levels, states, and subject areas.

Kaplan’s Test Strategies supply teachers with up-to-date research-based paradigms. Expositions of proven methods for meeting the pedagogical needs of particular students take the guess-work out of a teacher’s responsibility. This provides great benefits to schools by helping them satisfy their legal mandates, but, on the other hand, also frees up a teacher’s time to concentrate on what’s most important.

Kaplan fully supports these conceptual guides with curricular-based items, like Skills Review and Test Readiness materials, as well as the Kaplan Achievement Planner 2.0, a Web-based service to further supplement their print-based items. This online program allows teachers and administrators the opportunity to use test results data to automatically create student skill reports.

The diverse resources made available through the Kaplan K12 Learning Services can offer the working educator the opportunity to reach for what is often held to be one of the most important values that schools can transmit, the concept of freedom through structure. For more information on the Kaplan K12 programs, call 1-888-kaplan8, or log on to the company’s website at www.kaptest.com#

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