Value Added School Gain by Year

As indicated by the value added graph below, Fairmount Park’s value added scores have surpassed the district gain by 3.5% in reading and 2.4% in math.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills:  DIBELS is a relatively new literacy measure in our building.  We are including the data for this year only to show growth from fall to winter in oral reading fluency and other emergent reading skills such as phonemic awareness and letter naming fluency.  Our scores show an optimistic trend; we have moved 6% of our students out of the “at risk” category and 6% of our students into the “low risk” category (grades 1-5, non bilingual).  In kindergarten we moved 31% of our students out of the “at risk” category between fall of 2005 and winter 2006.

 

Fairmount Park	DIBELS - Fall 05 - Winter '06
	Low Risk	Some  Risk	At Risk	Goal:
First Grade ORF - W	44	39	17	20 wpm -Winter
Second Grade ORF - F	52	22	26	44 wpm - Fall
Second Grade ORF - W	55	14	32	68 wpm - Winter
Third Grade ORF - F	45	34	21	77 wpm - Fall
Third Grade ORF - W	52	26	22	92 wpm - Winter
Fourth Grade ORF - F	43	17	39	93 wpm - Fall
Fourth Grade ORF - W	47	32	21	105 wpm - Winter
Fifth Grade ORF - F	23	23	55	104 wpm -Fall
Fifth Grade ORF - W	33	33	33	115 wpm - Winter
				Goal:
K - Initial Sound - F	45	21	34	8 sounds - Fall
K- Initial Sound - W	40	57	3	25 sounds - Winter
K - Letter Naming - F	47	24	29	8 letter names - Fall
K - Letter Naming - W	53	33	13	27 letter names - Winter
1st- Letter Naming - F	42	29	29	37 letter names - Fall
K - Phoneme Seg. - W	67	17	17	18 letter names - Winter
1st- Phoneme Seg. -F	58	21	21	35 phonemes - Fall
1st - Phoneme Seg.W	78	22		35 phonemes - Winter
K - Nonsense Word - W	57	37	7	13 letter sounds - Winter
1st- Nonsense Word F	38	42	21	24 letter sounds - Fall
1st - Nonsense Word W	44	33	22	50 letter sounds - Winter
2nd - Nonsense Word F	57	26	17	50 letter sounds - Fall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Data Analysis

v     What are the overall conclusions you have drawn from the last 6 years of WASL reading, math, and writing data?

Every year, the staff at Fairmount Park sits down and analyzes our WASL data.  Our reading scores have been on an upward trend, approaching District Standards.  Fairmount Park’s math scores faltered a bit since 2004; however, our writing scores swung up in 2005.

In Reading, the trend for the past six years has been positive.   Our students seem to excel in the areas of analyzing and interpreting literary text, scoring well above the District and State scores, but falter on the comprehension piece of this type of text.  In the area of informational text, the results are level in comprehension and analyze/interpret, with scores slightly less than District and State standards.   We believe more exposure to informational texts and familiarizing students with the various types of informational texts will help boost these scores to what we are seeing in the literary text areas.

In Math, we are struggling to boost our scores to meet the district standards.  This year, we have continued to reinforce the DMI initiative, and are incorporating many of these techniques into our mathematical teachings.   Furthermore, we added Math Excel, which provides daily practice with a variety of math skills. 

In Writing, we see positive trends, but again, we have examined the WASL writing breakdown in order analyze our strengths and weaknesses.   In terms of our strengths, our conventions and spelling have moved up from 33% to 39%.  We also acknowledge that our content and organization declined from 40% to 33%.  This trend of our students’ test scores rising in conventions but declining in content is actually a reverse trend from the previous year, indicating that we must continue to employ a balanced approach in teaching writing.

v     How does the achievement data for each of your sub-groups compare with the district data for those groups?

Using Value Added data to compare our sub-groups to those of the District, Fairmount Park is seeing a positive trend, although we are still achieving below District standard.  Looking at our 4^th Grade scores from 2004 to 2005, we have seen our reading scores gain 3.6%, while our math scores have increased 6.8%. 

v     How does the achievement data for each of your sub-groups compare with state data for those groups?

Since Fairmount Park is a small school, each of our ethnic sub-groups are less than 10 students, therefore comparing our data to the state’s data isn’t accurate.  We would be comparing individual students instead of groups of students.  Therefore, we focused on changes in our achievement by each gender.  In math, both genders achieved similarly in 2004, but in 2005 none of our female students passed the math WASL.  In reading, there was no gender gap for either year.  The writing scores across 2004 and 2005 were very similar in terms of gender, with our male students lagging slightly behind our female students.   The table below indicates actual numbers of male and female student passing the writing, reading, and math WASL in 2005 and 2005. 

2004				2005
Boys		Girls		Boys		Girls
Passing Writing: 2	Failing Writing: 6	Passing Writing: 3	Failing Writing: 2	Passing Writing: 3	Failing Writing: 5	Passing Writing:  3	Failing Writing: 3
Passing Reading: 5	Failing Reading: 3	Passing Reading: 4	Failing Reading: 1	Passing Reading: 6	Failing Reading: 2	Passing Reading: 4	Failing Reading: 1
Passing Math: 2	Failing Math: 6	Passing Math: 4	Failing Math: 1	Passing Math: 3	Failing Math: 5	Passing Math: 0	Failing Math: 6

v     What is your analysis of students not passing the WASL?

With the exception of one student, all of the students not passing the reading WASL in 2005 were special education students.  To address this issue, we introduced some direct instruction reading curriculum into our self-contained special education classroom.  Additionally, we are currently training our resource room teacher in Linguistic Remedies, a research-based multi-sensory program for students with reading disabilities. 

Because of our high rate of students failing the math WASL in 2005, we implemented a program called Math Excel across kindergarten through fifth grade in 2005-2006.  Additionally, we employed two math tutors and set up a math lab with a math specialist. 

In writing, we determined that our students need much more explicit teaching and curriculum, so our entire staff attended a Step Up to Writing training and followed up by using Step Up to Writing  and Handwriting Without Tears curriculum in their classrooms.  Our 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th grade teachers have implemented Spellography, a research-based spelling program. 

v     What conclusions can you draw from a comparison of your Value Added Data to the District Value Added Data?

In Grade 4, our gain in math is 6.8% as compared to the District’s 9.9 % gain.  In reading, our gain was 3.6% in comparison to the district gain of 7.1%.