Program Title: Accelerate Student Achievement through Effective Use of Data and Student Goal Setting
District: Poway Unified School District
County: San Diego
The World teaching and learning is now awash with data and information. How best to use the information available to educators to maximize student success and performance? What role do students have in the process of their learning?
In 1999, for Poway Unified the challenge was not enough data, but managing that data. The district’s student achievement, attendance and discipline, and financial and personnel data were stored in proprietary departmental databases accessible by only a few individuals with specialized technical skills.
Today, though the development of an information management system that places a variety of student data on the desktop of every teacher and administrator, and the defining and implementing of an assessment system that engages students in individual goal-setting activities, Poway students are attaining the highest level of academic achievement in the history of the district.
In 2004, the U.S. Department of Education recognized Poway’s Total Information Management System (TIM) as a model for all districts to follow. The system was highlighted in the 2004 National Technology Plan.
Teachers no longer have to go to the office for information. Almost every piece of data available about their students now resides on their desktops. With a few mouse clicks, a teacher or administrator can view six years of assessment data, attendance history, grades, or GPA for any student or group of students they desire. They have access to student demographics and program details including each student’s daily schedule with hot links to the email of all their teachers. Data can be aggregated or disaggregated by teacher, course, period, ethnicity, gender, instructional program, and year; and you do not have to be a database technician to work it.
Data used this way can help improve the performance of schools and students. We know that students respond to clear, measurable targets and continuous feedback about their progress toward those targets. What was now needed was an assessment program with practical applications to teaching and learning. Ray Wilson, Poway’s Executive Director of Assessment and Accountability and his assessment team recommended the use of a computerized adaptive test (Measure of Academic Progress – MAPs) that measured individual student growth over-time and delivered immediate results.
Poway Unified’s assessment team developed three critical features to support the Measure of Academic Progress program for grades 2 through 8:
1. Using correlations to state assessments, each student is provided a performance target by specific academic areas (e.g. literal comprehension, measurement and geometry, etc.) This target provides the teacher and the student a starting place to being goal setting.
2. Poway’s PUSD Learning Ladder takes each student’s score and displays them in groups by grade level, class or by the individual student. These groupings are directly aligned to standards based learning objectives that are at each student’s instructional level.
3. Using a wealth of resources now provided on the web and placed on district web pages, teachers can reference this information and develop specific goals with students. These three elements have caused a significant shift in each student’s engagement and orientation to their own learning. This also allowed teachers to be much more knowledgeable at the individual student level in prescribing academic content for each student.
Using this assessment program, Poway’s team has been able to make direct correlations to each grade 2-8 student’s MAPs results and each student’s performance on the California Standards Test. These results are used to create specific targets to accelerate or maintain proficiency. Teachers meet with students periodically to discuss assessment results and work on individual goal setting.
An example of student meetings would be third grade teacher, Mrs. Ogden’s preparation for the meetings. Mrs. Ogden has developed booklets for each student to record personal goals in reading, math, and language arts and the action plan each student recommends following. The quote written by Mrs. Ogden on the cover of her students’ Snoop Troop Goals booklet says, “Success is the satisfaction of knowing you did your absolute best so you can reach your dreams in life!”
Through this program, students have become directly involved in understanding their own learning levels and targets. Teachers have greater confidence in the decisions around pin pointing academic content. Prior to this, students were left out of the process when analyzing assessments and determining instructional goals and activities. Teachers are much more able to individualize and provide small group assessment thanks to web based displays of students at varying performance levels. Most importantly, students and teachers are creating learning goals together. These goals are based upon current assessments and aligned objectives. This work has resulted in a fundamental shift in student engagement and teacher decision making.
“It’s like solving a mystery; readying the clues and replacing numbers with clarity, meaning, and purpose,” said Ray Wilson who often reminds teachers and administrators that to improve student achievement, the primary consumers of assessment data must be the students themselves.
The Poway Unified School District received recognition from the Classrooms of the Future 2008 Innovation I Education Awards Program in May, 2008 for this assessment program. Ray Wilson was named ACSA Region 9 Administrator of the Year in 2006 and Karen Eccles, Assessment and Accountability Supervisor was selected as ACSA Region 9 Classified Supervisor of the Year in 2007. Teams of educators from California and states throughout the nation continue to visit PUSD team members and school site classrooms to learn about this program.
Direct correlations to Poway Unified’s increased API (818 in 2002 to 864 in 2007) and percentage proficient on the California Standards Test are attributable to the targeted goals, individual student goal setting and aligned learning objectives provided for each student. Providing feedback about learning that is timely, accurate, and meaningful is key to accelerating learning and fast-forwarding student achievement.
Poway Unified School District’s Guiding Principles of Assessment
1. The essential purpose of assessment is the improvement of student learning.
2. Assessment must provide a comprehensive picture of student achievement.
3. Assessment must measure student growth over time.
4. Assessment must be valid and reliable.
5. Assessment data must be responsibly and efficiently collected and managed.
This program and the work of the assessment team have transformed the district’s data into meaningful information and opened the district’s various “silos” of data, making them accessible throughout the organization and unleashing their power to improve student achievement.