It's an excellent question - one that causes you to pause and reflect on all that you have seen and heard about your child's growth. If you are particularly reflective, I imagine this question crosses your mind at various times throughout the school year, possibly even more often. There are so many ways to answer the question...possibly social growth, emotional development, or academic growth. In January, our teaching staff begins to ask the same question..How are each of the students in my classroom performing? What is their current level of academic performance? Throughout the school year, teachers collect daily notes and records which they use to monitor student growth. Teachers also use end of unit assessments and other district assessments to evaluate progress. Additionally, the month of January is a time for what we call benchmarking student progress. As a whole school, Southeast has established benchmarks that we want our students to be achieving at this point in the school year. These benchmarks change for each grade level, increasing the standards significantly each year.
One of the assessments that we use is the STAR assessment. Students in second, third and fourth grades participate in this computer-based test. It is taken (minimally) three times each school year in the fall, winter and spring and takes approximately 20 minutes for both Math and Reading. Students participated in the first round of assessments in September which gave us a baseline of their performance. Some teachers may have discussed these assessment results at parent teacher conferences this year. We now have a comparison to see how our students have progressed since September. We took the test four months ago and on the whole our students have grown approximately half a school year already. We are quite pleased with our school results as a whole, and most individual results were promising. This is our first year of implementation of this system and we are getting more skilled at using it to its full capacity. Two great assets are: the teacher gets immediate results that are nationally and locally normed; and each assessment is unique - it self-adjusts based on student responses.
Another assessment that we use in January to monitor progress is the DRA-2. Teachers in grades K - 4 sit individually with each of their students to have them read a pre-determined leveled reader which will identify a child's instructional reading level. During the DRA there are many pieces of information that the teacher is evaluating, including: fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. Your child's teacher selects a level based on past performance and continues bumping up the reading level until the appropriate level is reached. Students will read both fiction and/or non-fiction books depending on their level. We use the DRA-2 results to help us select guided reading groups and/or intervention or enrichment groups. Lastly, our teachers goals are partially connected to student DRA results. We will be finished collecting these results this week.
Finally, the Bedrock assessments are given in January to evaluate spelling of sight words.
Overall, your child has participated in numerous assessments over the lasts 3 weeks. We will be using this data to continue to plan for your child and monitor their growth.
