Effective Data, Extraordinary Results

ATI is happy to report that we have witnessed continuous, data-verified student improvement among Galileo K-12 Online users across the country. We recently spoke to leadership from Champion Schools, a charter located in Phoenix, Arizona that has experienced exceptional academic gains earning them statewide recognition including being named Arizona Charter Schools Association’s 2013 Charter School of the Year. The school’s leadership attributes their impressive growth and sustained success to the school’s focused approach to intervention supported by Galileo K-12 Online.

Champion Schools’ principal, Heather Ray, offered the following, “My advice to any school looking to improve academically would be to use the data derived from Galileo pretests, benchmark, and posttests. Expand beyond the basic reports and learn how to utilize all the different functions … Galileo offers. Use that information to drive your instructional practices.”

Champion Schools saw an increase in the percent of students passing statewide tests from 2012-2014.

Read more of the full interview with Champion Schools and learn how they effectively used Galileo data and achieved extraordinary results. Read other data-based Success Stories.

Feedback to Enhance Learning

Both research and the classroom experience of teachers have consistently pointed to the importance of feedback in the instructional process. It isn’t sufficient to explain how to multiply fractions, take a derivative, or craft an essay. Students must understand why formulas work and why it is better to make a point in a particular way. To achieve this level of understanding, students must attempt to solve problems themselves. In the course of such active learning, mistakes will be made and will be revealed to both the student and the teacher.  Additional explanations and corrections can then be provided.

Feedback is at the intersection of assessment and instruction. When feedback is implemented, teaching is followed by evaluating results, which inform subsequent instruction. Making assessment more relevant to teaching is one of the cornerstone principles of the Common Core movement. Common Core assessments are designed to require higher levels of understanding than has been the norm in the past. It isn’t enough to have memorized problem-solving rules. One must understand the basis for those rules and be able to actually apply what has been learned.   
 
Toward that same end, ATI is working to modify our instructional platform to support these more complicated assessment tasks and providing the capability to provide feedback within the instructional environment to increase student understanding. Currently we have made available to districts a set of formative assessments built around these more interactive item types emphasizing greater depth of knowledge. By the start of the next school year it will be possible to put these new more complicated items in instructional dialogs that integrate assessment and instruction and provide the capability to offer feedback to enhance student understanding. Data from these assessment tasks will be available to the reporting engine thereby making it possible to both assess and instruct with the same resources. Look for announcements of the availability to these new tools as the start of the new school year gets closer.

By John R. Bergan, Ph.D., Vice President of Research and Development