Authentic Assessment
As a public school, Explorer is required to administer the California State Standards Tests to our students every year. However, these tests take place one time per year, in the spring. Because we receive results in the fall, these tests are not helpful in planning for students. Therefore, Explorer’s faculty has developed a series of assessments that we feel are more authentic and that give us immediate feedback which can inform the teaching and planning of our curriculum. We perform these assessments in the fall and spring, and sometimes mid-year as well.
We use the Wright Group Reading Assessment in Kindergarten and the Basic Reading Inventory in grades 1-5 as a way to assess students’ decoding, fluency and comprehension.
We use the CTB/McGraw Hill Balanced Assessment in Mathematics in grades 3-5 to test how students apply the skills they learn in our Everyday Math program to conceptual word problems.
To assess writing, our faculty has designed writing prompts and scoring rubrics to be used at every grade level to analyze students’ writing abilities in their grade specific genres. These are simple in the early grades, but by 4th and 5th grade, the rubrics include organization, content, vocabulary, and other indicators of strong and effective writing. Periodically, our faculty revises rubrics and compares them across grade levels to make sure our expectations are progressing in a consistent way.
While each teacher looks at individual students’ assessments to inform their class instruction, we also look at the whole school’s progress to make recommendations for our curriculum and to celebrate our successes. For example, in the early years, several of our classrooms did “Problem of the Day”, a practical word problem that children do first thing in the morning when they sit down at their desks. Through analysis of school-wide data, we found that children in those classrooms did consistently better in the math assessments. So we made a recommendation that all classes do Problem of the Day, and now they do.
Some of our findings from the 2007-2008 school year include…
Ninety eight percent of our students are reading at or above grade level with 67% reading two or more levels above. The average growth a student showed in reading was 1½ grade levels in one year. In math, our students showed an average increase in their scores from fall to spring of 21%. Students new to Explorer showed an increase of 22.5%.
Our writing scores also showed growth. In their grade specific genres, students improved on average a half point in writing mechanics and a full point in content on our four point rubric.
