Format provides better gauge of student progress, they say
By Jennifer Eisenbart
Staff Writer
For the last two years, the Burlington Area School District has been stressing the importance of moving away from the Wisconsin Knowledge Concept Exams as an accurate representation of student achievement.
With the state set to end those exams next year – and possibly move to the ACT suite of exams (the EXPLORE, PLAN and ACT exams) – the district started to find a different way to gauge what students were learning using the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, testing.
On Monday night, the BASD School Board’s Curriculum Committee got a review on just how well district students are doing on those tests – not just on making improvements, but improving in comparison to schools throughout the nation.
After spending some time setting the stage Monday night, Assistant Superintendent Connie Zinnen said the goal for the MAP testing this year was for all grade levels to be above the national mean RIT score.
Those RIT scores are calculated to not only measure students’ progress, but to rate them against the eventual end-knowledge score. As a result, a 12-point gain in grade two might be the equivalent of a two-point gain in grade 10.
That said, the district came close to having every grade level above the national mean on its spring scores. Seven of the nine levels tested were above the national mean in reading, and six of the nine levels were above the national mean in math.
“We thought it was a lofty goal,” said Zinnen. “(But) we were pretty confident that that was a goal we wanted to meet.”
BASD does three MAP tests per grade level per year, and measures against the fall national mean norm and the spring national mean norm. The spring scores should higher, as students are expected to know more with an additional year of instruction under their belts.
Here’s a closer look at the scores at the various local grade levels:
Elementary schools
The math and reading scores for the MAP testing in kindergarten through sixth grade impressed the elementary school principals on hand to recount the data.
In reading, the first- and second-grade RIT scores ranked in the 98th percentile among growth in national schools, and in the 99th percentile in fifth and sixth grades.
For math, first grade ranked in the 99th percentile, second and third grades in the 98th percentile, fourth grade in the 97th percentile and sixth grade in the 94th percentile.
Outgoing Winkler School principal Jennifer Barnabee attributed the success to the action steps established by the teachers, which included setting goals with students, using Compass Learning to target skill deficit areas, implementing intervention groups and using pre- and post-testing.
“Goal setting definitely mattered to the students,” Barnabee said.
Cooper School Principal Christine Anderson said the teachers have also embraced co-teaching, and a universal curriculum.
“The thought now is that, ‘these are our students,’” she said.
The grades that missed hitting the national mean norms still improved – fourth grade reading and fifth grade math.
Middle school
At Karcher Middle School, the improvement goals split evenly. Both seventh and eighth grade reading students met their improvement goals, while both math grades just missed.
That said, outgoing Karcher Principal Marty McGinley said he would take both of his math teachers with him to his news job at the Wheatland School District if he could.
The seventh grade RIT math scores were 1.9 points off the national mean, while the eighth grade scores were just .8 points back.
High school
Burlington High School was the only school not measured based on the MAP scores. There, the students worked on the ACT PLAN test (grade 10) and the ACT exam (grade 11).
Those scores were reported earlier in the year, but the PLAN scores – a test taken by every 10th-grade student – showed an 18.3 average score in English (proficient level at that age group is 15), 18.3 in math (proficient 19), 18 in reading (proficient 17) and 19.1 in science (proficient 21).
Not all 11th graders took the ACT exam, and those scores are expected in July, according to BHS principal Eric Burling.
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