The Plymouth School Board got some more details Tuesday about the ISTEP scores at the corporation’s elementary schools. The four elementary principals each presented their school’s scores, as well as some of their plans for improvement.
One of the trends seen at most of the schools was that scores were significantly higher at the third-grade level than the fourth-grade level. The lone exception to this was Webster Elementary.
Menominee Principal Steven Boyer said he hasn’t yet figured out what caused this trend, “I have not begun to look into that yet, in terms of when we’re looking at getting our improvement plan for ’16-17, really digging into some of the standards breakdown to get a better understanding of what happened there. I have not gotten into that work yet.”
Another issue was that Math scores generally lagged behind those of English/Language Arts, something experienced by schools around the state. School officials say it’s because of the new standards adopted by the state last school year.
Webster principal Carrie McGuire says students continue to struggle with this new approach to Math testing, as they begin taking this year’s ISTEP test this week. “What they’re asking students to do is just multi-step types of things, where they have to use different types of processes within them,” she said. “They might have to add some things and then subtract a little bit and multiply to be able to get the answer, and it’s just really complex. So not just the mathematical concepts as far as ‘Can I do addition and subtraction?’ but the whole picture of ‘Where do I even start?'”
Some other features of the new Math test include more text, making it especially difficult for those students in the process of learning English, as well as more distractions for students to sort through in order to find useful information. Although the test that students are currently taking is based on the same standards as last year’s, a change in vendor means it will still be difficult to compare it to last year’s, even when results are known.
Superintendent Dan Tyree said the future of the ISTEP is still up in the air, “So when you hear on the news that the testing is a political ping-pong ball, it really is, because what they’re doing as a state doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not fair to our kids. It’s not fair to our teachers. But, we’re not making any excuses. We’re going to go after it as best we can, and now that we know what it looks like, it’ll help us get there. But they’re going to change it, and it may happen again in the legislature this year, that they may say, ‘We’re going to change it again.’ So this may not be the end of it.”
In their response plans, many of the Plymouth elementary school principals included provisions to give students math assignments that more closely resemble the types of word problems they will see on the ISTEP.
