Enhance Your Testing Mom Experience With MindPrint

posted by Karen Quinn, The Testing Mom - May 23rd, 2022

Enhance Your Testing Mom Experience With MindPrint
By Adam Cook

Hello Testing Mom Family!

I’m excited to share with you a new development in our services. Beginning in June, Testing Mom members can purchase a MindPrint assessment at a deeply discounted price and review their child’s results with an education professional.

What Is a Mindprint Assessment and How Will It Help My Child? 

No matter how bright the child, every student struggles with something in school!  What learning challenge does your child wrestle with that you’d give anything to help them overcome?  Reading? Writing? Math?  Staying organized?  Learning New Concepts?

Unlike typical tests that tell you what your child knows and doesn’t know, a Mindprint assessment helps you understand why some learning challenges feel like a struggle to your child and other school tasks come easily and naturally.  Then, it gives you the optimal strategies you can use to help them perform at their potential.  It literally gives you a “blueprint” of your child’s strongest to weakest cognitive skills – the underlying abilities that are most closely correlated to success in school subjects and on standardized tests.

Who Developed the Mindprint and How Do We Know This Test Works? 

Mindprint Learning was started by Nancy Weinstein, who was inspired by her own children’s learning challenges to find solutions she could not find elsewhere.  Using an assessment developed by neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, Nancy found that this test unlocked the secret to her own children’s cognitive strengths and needs.  The test assesses “memory, processing speed, attention, flexible thinking, verbal and abstract reasoning, and spatial perception using game-based and timed activities” – the skills most closely associated with performance in academics and on standardized tests such as the NWEA-MAP, SAT, ACT, state tests and more!

Mindprint’s assessment is a one-hour online test that your child can take in the comfort of their home.  The test measures your child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses.   It can be taken by children between the ages of 8 and 21.  Discovering the key to her own children’s abilities inspired Nancy to start Mindprint Learning, a company that now gives parents and educators access to this same powerful assessment and insightful reporting that has now been given to over 100,000 participants worldwide (including over 10,000 children).

How Does the Mindprint Assessment Process Work

We will get into the basics of how MindPrint works and what it can do for your child in a bit, but first, I want to give you a quick overview of how the assessment process will work.

Testing Mom has recently opened sign-ups for MindPrint to parents through our website. Parents will purchase the MindPrint assessment package at our exclusive discounted rate (regular pricing for MindPrint assessment packages are typically $199) and have their child complete the 1-hour assessment via an online portal. Once the assessment is complete, MindPrint will take care of the rest.

Parents will receive a comprehensive report of their child’s performance through their Mindprint Profile. After student results have been received, an expert who understands how to interpret and apply the Mindprint report will call each parent to discuss the results to ensure a thorough understanding of your child’s learning profile and how Testing Mom can help you best utilize this invaluable information.

So how does MindPrint work?

As I mentioned earlier, the assessment is taken online and only takes about 1 hour to complete. In order to complete the assessment, students will simply need reliable internet connection, Chrome browser (preferred), computer speakers or headphones, and a mouse (recommended).

Once a student logs into their MindPrint portal, they can begin the assessment. Since the assessment tests cognitive abilities, there is no way to prepare for it, and complete focus without distractions or assistance will yield the best results (…and by best results, I mean the most honest and accurate for your child’s ability).

The directions provided within the assessment are very clear and easy to follow, even for a young child. Each task within MindPrint is preceded by an example or practice question. Having taken the assessment myself, I do have a few suggestions. I won’t give any spoilers, but I do recommend that your child use headphones and have a comfortable place to take the assessment. Make sure that wherever your child takes MindPrint, they are in a place they can sit and focus for up to an hour at a time.  If you have a younger (or fidgety) child taking the assessment, you might want to have them take it in two half-hour sessions.  There are natural stopping points in the assessment where you can take breaks. This would be a great time to review my recent blog post about creating an effective learning environment for your child.

I also highly recommend removing any possible distractions or aids, such as pen, paper, calculators, or anything else your child might be tempted to use. To avoid frustration, I would also make sure that your child’s computer screen is bright enough to easily see all images. The tasks are very much like puzzles and can be fun.  Some of the tasks are challenging, so tell your child not to get overwhelmed or frustrated – everyone who takes this assessment finds some of the puzzles to be tricky!

The most important thing is that your child stays focused and does their best. Remember, the goal of the assessment is to get a clear picture of where your child is at and how their brain functions.  Assessment results typically take 24-48 hours to be processed and returned, at which point MindPrint recommends parents review the results with a Testing Mom expert, reflect on them for a few days, and then discuss them with your child. Of course, Testing Mom will be here to guide you through that process.

The MindPrint Profile

“At the core of our solution is the MindPrint profile which identifies a student’s learning strengths in straight-forward terminology with actionable next steps to support academic and social emotional growth across subjects.” (MindPrint Learning, 2022).

The most valuable part of the MindPrint system is the MindPrint Profile that each parent will receive once their child has completed the assessment. You can see a sample profile here, but I wanted to highlight a few of the features that will be in your child’s report.

The first section that parents will see in their child’s profile is a summary of their performance. There will be three sections based on different percentile ranges of performance. Your child’s results will be categorized based on how their performance relates to standardized, normative data for your child’s age group.

In the section that follows, the cognitive skills in the blue area are within the middle of the bell curve or expected range for this student.  Each cognitive skill is explained in the report.  The child’s working memory is their strongest skill and their verbal reasoning skills are their lowest (within the expected range).  You may need to support your child’s verbal reasoning skills.

The Mind Print report gives you strategies your child can use to bolster their verbal reasoning skills. Even though their results were in the expected range, they were at the low end so they may be a blocker to success in verbal reasoning tasks.

In the next section, we can see that this student has very strong flexible thinking skills.  Their verbal memory skills are the weakest abilities for this child, and they may be holding them back in school.

As mentioned, the MindPrint report comes with detailed explanations of each cognitive skill and provides strategies for how the student can reinforce or improve their skills. This is the information that will be important for parents to reflect on. You will want to read over the explanations and decide whether or not they match your experience with your child. After taking the assessment myself, I found that most of the criteria and explanations in my report were spot-on with how I would have assessed myself as a learner.

The Learner Profile

The real value with the MindPrint report is going to be in your child’s MindPrint Learner Profile. The profile, combined with your child’s assessment results in the report, are going to give you a wealth of information about the way your child thinks and learns and what they can do to improve. The report contains a “Next Steps” section that contains recommendations for specific subject-area curriculum and instruction as well as a specific plan for improving support areas and reinforcing strengths.

At first glance, the sheer amount of information you will receive in their MindPrint report may be overwhelming, but we will call you and walk you through the report, explaining each section to you so that it becomes a meaningful tool you can use to help your child do their best work in school.  Each child’s report will also come with a “MindPrint Toolbox” section that will assist you in further translating each section of the report in a way that is actionable to you, your child and the education professionals in your life. Of course, Testing Mom will also be right by your side each step of the way to make your child’s MindPrint analysis a valuable asset in their ongoing learning experiences.

How can Testing Mom help your child?

Because MindPrint provides “objective measures across core domains of executive functions, complex reasoning, memory, and speed,” our tutors and instructors at Testing Mom will be able to help your child by pinpointing key strengths, growth areas, and learning needs across different subjects. Basically, your child’s MindPrint Profile is going to provide a roadmap that will guide us in what we do best, help your child succeed, with precise, evidence-based data to support our instructional approach

Using the MindPrint report, we will discuss your child’s specific learning strengths and needs with you and develop a tailored plan to help you and your child get the most out of our services. Since our goal is to help your child reach their full learning potential, we will work with you to use the MindPrint report as a solid foundation for website, tutoring and group class instruction decisions. The best part is that even if you aren’t sure where to start, we will be able to use your child’s MindPrint results to develop a unique learning plan for that works for them. Ultimately, MindPrint is going to help us get to know how your child most naturally learns so that we can provide them with exact instructional techniques they need to make significant progress.

Having been a teacher in public education for the last 10 years, I can personally attest to the necessity of targeted and precise performance data to provide effective instruction that results in student learning. I certainly wish MindPrint existed when I was a student so that my parents and teachers could have used that information to better understand what I needed from them as a learner. Having spent a significant amount of time researching this process, I can confidently say that my children will be taking a MindPrint assessment each year to evaluate their progress and to make sure myself, my wife, and children’s teachers have the tools and information they need to meet our children where they are in the learning process. At Testing Mom, we are dedicated to doing just that for your children. We are excited at the prospect of using MindPrint to help your child succeed for years to come.

“About MindPrint.” MindPrint Learning, https://v1.mindprintlearning.com/blog/about/

“MindPrint Nationally Normed Cognitive Assessment.” Cognitive Literacy Solutions, 12 Dec. 2021, https://mybrainware.com/mindprint-cognitive-assessment/.

MindPrint Learning, MindPrint Learning Sample Learner Profile, https://my.mindprintlearning.com/pdfs/Mindprint%20Learning%20Sample%20Learner%20Profile.pdf. Accessed 20 May 2022.

“Parents: MindPrint Learning.” MindPrint, https://www.mindprintlearning.com/parents.

TheBrainProgram, director. YouTube, YouTube, 9 Apr. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulpForLLICM. Accessed 20 May 2022.

Yours in Learning,
Adam Cook
TestingMom.com Director of Curriculum Design

Adam Cook, M.Ed. is a certified teacher and principal with more than 10 years of experience as a classroom teacher, coach, curriculum designer, and academic coordinator. He is the Director of Curriculum Design for TestingMom.com. Adam and his wife live in McKinney, Texas, where he works as a high school English teacher and is a doctoral candidate in Education Administration at Texas A&M University-Commerce.