Adequate Yearly Progress poses challenge for schools
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POLSON — School districts in Lake County are not all making the grade when it comes to meeting the standards for Adequate Yearly Progress, and new data indicate school districts continue to face challenges.
According to the Office of Public Instruction in Helena, data coming out for the 2009-2010 school year next week will show what progress Montana schools have made in the past school year. It is based on the Criterion-reference Test.
In what is being anticipated by school district officials as a barometer of their own progress, the AYP results will help the state determine which schools are meeting the standards of federal education legislation.
AYP is based on the CRT.
As an example of what students face on the standardized test given in the spring, students face various levels of assessment:
“Parents of King School students will buy a new piece of playground equipment. The fourth and fifth grade students voted for the type of playground equipment they would like to have. The results are shown in the chart below.
Students’ Voting Results for Playground Equipment
a. “On the grid in your Student Response Booklet, make a double bar graph that shows the fourth and fifth grade students’ votes for each type of playground equipment. Be sure to label your graph, provide a title, and provide a key to show which bars are fourth-grade votes and which bars are fifth-grade votes.
b. “Which type of playground equipment should the parents buy? Use the data to support your reasoning.”
This problem appeared on a fifth grade CRT in 2008, and is just an example of the questions.
Schools all across Montana are required to give students a Criterion-referenced Test in reading and math in grades 3, 5, 8 and 10.
Since it’s a math question, the question above required a graph or a “constructed response” in CRT language.
Reading questions, however, are multiple choice, and some math questions require short answers.
CRT’s have been given to Montana school children annually since 2004. Then the numbers are compared. For the 2009-2010 school year to meet Adequate Yearly Progress, the percentage of students in a school who scored proficient or advanced needed to be 68 percent in math and 83 percent in reading according to data from the Montana Office of Public Instruction.
