LEAD 21 Assessments

My class has just completed Unit 6 within our language arts curriculum. Recently, we experienced a schedule change to allow time to implement morning meeting and also add a bit more consistent time to our reading block. In looking back at my student scores and data, I feel that it has been our best scores/percentages this year. What was the reason for an increase in scores? Was it more consistent time to reading instruction? Did the students just work harder? Was it easier than prior unit assessments? We had added a few more minutes to our small group time as well more time for whole group, which could have played a role in improving scores. I believe we will continue the current schedule into our next unit as well. I have been sharing this with other colleagues and a few have experimented with a change as well.

After the completion of each unit assessment, I have been trying to analyze it to see what problems and skills most of the students got incorrect. This past assessment, there were only two problems where more than 25% of the class got incorrect. Both of these problems showed 50%  of the class answered them correctly. This information tells me that we need more practice on these skills as half the class got them wrong. One of the skills involved determining word relationships and the other involved summarizing. I still feel many students messed up on the word relationships as they did not take time to carefully read all of the choices, there were two similar word choices and many chose incorrectly. However, it is something that we need more work on as we continue in to unit 7. I took a look in the next units and did not see these skills reviewed or addressed, so I need to be sure to touch on them in the coming weeks.

One other area that we as a class need to improve in is the area of written responses. I still had a number of students receive a one out of two (1/2) in regard to written response questions. It is also something we will also build in to unit 7 and take time to do more of this together as a class so students can see it modeled. I will seek to practice this in large group but also take time for students to work on this skill during their small group time with me.

I also was able to compare the 2011-12 class with the past 2010-11 and see that there was an improvement as well. Many factors that went into this improvement.