Elevating Student Achievement Seminar - Submit a Question

ATI is hosting the Elevating Student Achievement Seminar: Exploring What Works on February 3 at the Hyatt Tech Center in Denver. If you’re interested in registering, please visit the seminar website for specific details about the event.

The seminar will be a dialog on instructional interventions and the elevation of student achievement. If you know of any others in your district interested in registering, please feel free to pass the following link on to them - www.ati-online.com/WhatWorks

We’re also encouraging those interested in submitting a question pre-event for seminar panel discussions on the following topics:

• The benefits of and challenges encountered when implementing an instructional improvement initiative.
• The benefits of and challenges encountered when managing an instructional improvement initiative.

E-mail your questions to GalileoInfo@ati-online.com and they will be considered for inclusion at the seminar. Questions related to the seminar that we are unable to address at the event will be answered here on the Town Hall Blog.

We look forward to hearing your questions!

Thoughts on Race to the Top: Collaboration and local control

By now, grant applications for the federal Race to the Top (RTT) program are in preparation across the country. There are a lot of state department of education employees who are likely to have a hardworking holiday season as applications for the first wave of funding are due in January. With the 4.3 billion dollars that has been allocated, states will have significant resources that can be brought to bear to make the kind of sweeping and dramatic updates and changes to school systems that are called for as part of this federal initiative.

The guidelines presented to the states to prepare their RTT applications contained two clear themes. On the one hand, state education initiatives are supposed to preserve the “flexibility and autonomy” of LEAs. There is clear recognition of the need for districts to be supported in their efforts to make decisions about curriculum assessments and other issues that are in the best interests of their staff and students. In addition to the call for local control there is also a clear mandate for collaboration. States are encouraged to adopt common standards and collaborate to produce common assessments. One of the questions that state governments face in their preparation of their proposals is how best to balance these two, at times seemingly contradictory, objectives.

One of the ways that collaboration could be facilitated, while at the same time preserving the decision making power of the districts is for the state to make available to districts an item bank in which all of the items are on the same scale. These items could be used on both district interim assessments and the state test. What would this mean for the sake of districts you ask? Such an item bank would afford the opportunity to make sure that the assessments composed of these items, either entirely or in part, can be placed on the same scale. This means that the scores are directly comparable. The 500 on the math test given in the middle of the year could be compared directly to the 550 on the state test at the end of the year. Put another way, in this case, the statement could be made that the ability level required to achieve 550 on the benchmark test is higher than the ability level required to achieve 500 on the state test. Without tests that are on a common scale, such comparisons are not possible. The 550 might represent higher ability than the 500 and then again it might not. Having a common measuring stick could go a long way towards facilitating collaborative work.

A common item bank could also greatly assist smaller districts in their efforts to implement valid and reliable interim assessments for the purpose of informing instruction. The utility of assessment results is greatly aided to the extent that they reflect the kids that actually attend the district schools and the instructional priorities of the district. Research has consistently shown that the items behave differently when students change or when instruction changes. Ongoing analysis of test behavior is critical to making sure results are reliable and valid for the kids with whom it will be used. Such analysis is difficult with districts that have only small numbers of kids. Having a common item bank from which to draw could make it much easier to do the necessary analyses to back up an assessment initiative with a small district.

Achieving these beneficial results does not require that both the state and district tests are comprised entirely of items from this bank. The only requirement is that they both contain a sample of items from the bank. This would leave the district free to include local items reflecting content which may not be of interest to other districts in the state. Easy communication and collaboration need not be sacrificed in order to continue to achieve the flexibility and autonomy that allows districts to make sure that instructional improvement systems meet their priorities.

Anyhow, I had best sign off at this point. This post is already rather lengthy. We would, as always, be interested in hearing the feedback of others about these ideas or about other topics.

Elevating Student Achievement: What Works

There is widespread agreement that in order to continue to be competitive in the global society in which we live, we must elevate student achievement significantly beyond current levels. The current national commitment to elevating student achievement is apparent in the Federal Race to the Top initiative which commits over four billion dollars to the national effort to increase student achievement.

We have certainly not reached the point where we can say that we have solved the problem of how to significantly increase student achievement. We will not be able to make that claim until the goal of increasing achievement has been realized. Yet, there is evidence regarding what works to elevate achievement. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the solution to the problem of elevating achievement can be rather straight forward.

There is evidence suggesting that one effective way to elevate student achievement is to administer a series of interim benchmark assessments aligned to academic standards and to the district curriculum and to use the results of each benchmark to re-teach the skills that students have not yet mastered. The Massachusetts Department of Education commissioned MAGI Services to conduct a study evaluating the use of ATI’s Galileo K-12 Online to elevate achievement. The study revealed that when teachers used Galileo benchmark assessments to guide instruction achievement was enhanced. This finding was not surprising to us. Nearly twenty years ago we conducted a study published in 1991 in the American Educational Research Journal that revealed findings consistent with those found in the MAGI Services study. We also note that for many years, WestEd has emphasized the importance of using interim assessments to guide instruction in its Local Accountability Professional Development Series. A number of “success stories” have also emerged that support re-teaching based on benchmark results. The remarkable success of the Vail Unified School District in Arizona is an example. Many other examples are beginning to emerge.

We believe that interim benchmark assessment can play an important role in elevating achievement in the years ahead. In this connection, we were delighted to find support for re-teaching utilizing interim benchmark assessment results and results from other assessments in the information provided in the Federal Register regarding the Race to the Top initiative. The Federal Register information on the Race to the Top program defines interim assessments, discusses the importance of establishing the reliability and validity of these assessments, and describes their use in guiding instructional decisions. A policy brief on the role of interim assessments in a comprehensive assessment system prepared jointly by the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment and the Aspen Institute attests further to the growing recognition of the importance of interim benchmark assessments in guiding instructional decisions.

Given the straightforward nature of the approach and the growing body of evidence supporting its use, it would seem that jumping on the interim assessment bandwagon would not be a bad idea. We at ATI certainly agree. We have been developing interim benchmark assessments for use in guiding instruction for several years. However, deciding to use interim assessments to guide instruction is a bit like deciding to lose weight. It’s simple. Eat less, or if you want a complicated version, eat less and exercise more. Yet, losing weight is easier said than done. That is also the case with respect to using benchmark assessment to guide instruction.

Recently in a presentation to the Arizona Educational Research Organization (AERO), we initiated a discussion of the critical characteristics of interim benchmark assessments, the management technology needed to support an interim assessment initiative, the challenges associated with implementing such an initiative, and ways of addressing those challenges. You can find the presentation on our website. In the weeks and months ahead, we will be presenting success stories from a number of districts that will inform the discussion. The first of these recounts the remarkable achievements of the Laveen Elementary School District located in Laveen Arizona. This district achieved increases in the percentage of students meeting standards on the Arizona statewide test AIMS at every grade.

Stay tuned and give us your two cents. I know it’s not four billion dollars, but we still value it, and I am sure that the school districts meeting the challenge to elevate student achievement will value it too.