ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The school year has ended, which means results from testing from the end of the year have officially come in.
Monday evening, the USD 480 school board got to hear those results from District Interventionist Jennifer Hyde.
“We had come before the board in February with the middle-of-year testing results, and we now have all the data from our end-of-year assessments,” Hyde said. “We are still waiting on the official state testing results, and we probably won't get those until November or December, and we'll share that data as soon as we get that.”
Up first was from Hyde was data from the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) testing,
“All students in kindergarten through fifth grade take that reading test three times a year except for students who have specific learning disabilities, and they take the DLM (Dynamic Learning Maps) assessment,” Hyde said. “As a reminder, the students who test at the lowest levels are the students who get that intensive Tier 3 support, the students who test one level above them get the Tier 2 intervention, and then the rest of the students are considered either at benchmark or above benchmark, and they receive the core instruction. We always want to see a decrease in the number of students below benchmark and an increase in the number of students either at benchmark or above benchmark. We saw the greatest growth in kindergarten, which makes sense since they come to us with a clean slate, and we always see a lot of growth with that age group. They start out testing pretty low, but they're about like sponges and absorb everything they can. We increased the number of students at benchmark and above benchmark at the kindergarten level, it was about a 33 percent increase there. And if you'll all remember, this is a one-on-one test between the teacher and student.”
Hyde said there was much progress seen.
“With the first graders, we did have a 15 percent decrease in the number of students well below benchmark, a 2 percent decrease in the number of students below benchmark, a 7 percent increase in the number of students at benchmark, and a 10 percent increase in the number of students above benchmark,” Hyde said. “With the second graders, we had a 14 percent decrease in the number of students well below benchmark, we stayed the same at the number of students below benchmark, and we saw increases in the number of students at benchmark and above benchmark. With the third, fourth and fifth graders, we didn't have as much growth as we would have liked to see for the students well below and below benchmark, because the skill gaps get larger, so there's typically not as much growth seen after second grade. With the third graders, we did see an 18 percent increase in the number of students at benchmark and above benchmark. With the fifth graders, we saw a 21 percent increase in the number of students at benchmark or above benchmark compared to the beginning of the year. And as always, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration, including the fact that there are a number of students who come to us in that third through fifth grade age group that haven't yet been to school, and we obviously can't put them in kindergarten, so we're working to help fill in the gaps as we go along. We don't take those students out of their core instruction, they're still getting their grade-level instruction, they're getting their intervention at a time that doesn't interfere with that work. If we took them out of their core instruction, those gaps would get bigger and bigger, and there's so much the students can learn from their language instruction – the further they're behind, the harder it is for them to catch up. And each building obviously has its own intervention schedule since each building is different and has different needs. Again, there are many factors that come into play, but we are definitely making strides in the right direction, and Dr. [Maria] Gomez-Rocque have had MANY conversations about what could be driving the numbers. However, with one of the schools, we did notice since we started doing more walk-throughs and having that type of interaction, there was a lot of noticeable growth there – I can't say whether or not that's THE reason for the growth, but I feel like it's definitely a factor in that positive growth.”
Hyde also briefly talked about summer school students.
“With the students who get recommended for summer school, Dr. Gomez-Rocque did a great job talking to those principals as far as what the criteria would need to be used. In the past, in my opinion – with the elementary schools, anyway – if you wanted to come to summer school, you could come,” Hyde said. “But that rather defeats the purpose of summer school because if I'm teaching second grade and still have 18 students in the classroom, I can't get to those small groups and give them the attention they need. There's still work to do, but I think we did a lot better this year at least on the elementary side in getting in the students who really needed to be there. There were some parents who weren't happy, but the purpose is to help students fill in those gaps so they're ready for the next year.”
Hyde then talked about the iReady results.
“As you'll all also probably recall, iReady is what we use for our math assessment for kindergarten through fifth grade again, and the setup is slightly different with that,” Hyde said. “With the iReady assessment, students test out either above grade level, at grade level, one grade level below, two grade levels below, or three or more grade levels below, and the students in those bottom three categories receive that intervention. With the students who tested at and above grade level at the beginning of the year, there were only 24 students at that level in the fall, and that number came out to 313 at the end of the year, which is a big increase we're proud of. We've been doing iReady longer than CKLA, which I think is also a factor in what we're seeing. At the beginning of the year, we had 795 students test out one grade level below, two grade levels below, or three or more grade levels below, and that number went down to 108, which was outstanding to see. Dr. Gomez-Rocque and I are looking forward to seeing if that pattern is the same with the state testing, because last year, we did see growth with both iReady and the state assessments, so I'll be interested to see if that trend continues. And both the teachers and students like iReady, which is great to see. And I feel the iReady assessment tells a more accurate picture of things compared to the state assessments. The state assessments are important, but they don't tell the full story, because you can't just give a student one test on one day and consider that the absolute baseline. The iReady assessments also happen more often, so that helps track students' progress better as the year goes along.”
Hyde then concluded her presentation by talking about the results from the Fastbridge testing.
“Fastbridge is what we use with the middle school and high school testing with reading and math. We give the aREADING to students in grades 2 through 12, and this is tests those foundational skills on the computer, so the students get to do it on their own, and it’s a timed test, so it’s also testing them on automaticity, decoding, synonyms/antonyms, vocabulary, prefixes/suffixes, etc.,” Hyde said. “This was the first year we did the test with grades 2 through 5, and after I met with the principals a couple weeks ago, we decided we're not going to do aREADING for 2 through 5 anymore since we do that same thing with the DIBELS test, so it's rather redundant. However, we will continue doing that testing with grades 6 through 9. We used to do the MAPS testing, but that always took a rather long time, which is why we switched, and we talked about that back in February. We saw some increases with some grades and decreases with others at the elementary level, and like with the other testing, there are a lot of factors that come into play with all of that. With grades 6 though 8, each grade level saw increases, which I thought was great to see at that level. With the high schoolers, we saw some increases and decreases across all those grade levels. With the Fastbridge math for the high schoolers, there is some messy data there because the high school was trying to decide who they wanted to take the test depending on which class(es) they were enrolled in and other factors, so that data isn't entirely solid. However, it should be more solid next year.”
