July 25th Board Meeting -- Reading Room Study Results (Preliminary, Part 2)

Continuing....

Dr. Mahaffy began presenting, looking at the question of how much gain did students in the lower group make. While in 1st Grade, 9 of 17 students were moved out of the lower Reading group. In the 2nd Grade, 3 of 10 were moved out. In the 3rd Grade, 7 of 10 were moved out. He then looked at students in the 4th and 5th Grades, when they were in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Grades. (This went a little fast for me, too, and I didn't have the slides that were being shown, so I will recommend looking at the meeting minutes when they are posted for some clarification on this group.) Overall in the study, 28 of 57 students were moved out of the lower Reading group.

It is important to note that the students in the lower Reading group are not constant -- students are moved both into and out of the lower group, so when there is a number of students in the lower group through the years, these are not necessarily the same students.

Dr. Mahaffy highlighted this point by looking at the 5th Graders, and noting that while they were in 1st Grade, one student was in the lower group, then in the 2nd Grade, 7 students were in the lower group. He said that he would hope that by 4th and 5th Grade, all of the students would have moved up from the lower group, but that hasn't happened.

Board President Zasadil noted that these students did not have the benefit of the Diagnostic Reading Center.

Dr. Mahaffy said that ITBS scores are a valuable indicator toward assessing students' progress, but it's not the only indicator. Others include fluency checks, Diagnostic Reading Center scores, and homework that can be assessed by teachers. He went on to say that students reading below grade level are averaging 1 year of growth, and the other students (at or above grade level) are averaging 1.1 years of growth.

He added that he and Dr. Krause will continue to work with Tim Kassel to determine if the preliminary results are statistically significant.

It was at this point that the discussion started to really take off. I'll continue that on the next post.....