(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)

Educators at Barret Middle
Are Asking the Hard Questions


With the help of former parent volunteer Annette Doyle, educators at Barret Traditional Middle School are using student data to look beyond the school's high averages and determine what's working and what's not for all kids.


By Holly Holland

Some people examine a school's student achievement data and ask, "Why?"

Annette Doyle looks at the same statistics and asks, "Why not?"

For the past six years, the former parent volunteer and now paid office clerk at Barret Traditional Middle School has been analyzing test scores, grade reports, census data, and any other figures that will help explain the patterns of academic performance among the school's students. Through colorful bar graphs, spreadsheets, and comparison charts, she turns ordinary numbers into interesting and revealing presentations.

"No matter what kind of data you want, she can get it for you and put it in a form that makes sense to people," said Cathy Mattingly, the media specialist at Barret and a former math teacher who shares some of the number-crunching duties with Doyle. "It's very hard for non-math persons to look at data and make sense of it. But when you see a picture and can visualize it all, it just helps the whole faculty."

Because students must be on grade level to enroll in one of the district's traditional programs, Barret routinely posts among the highest average test scores in Jefferson County. Leaders in the school know that they could "cruise" on the results of their best students, without much heat from the community or the district. But teachers and administrators realize that high averages can mask the weak performance of struggling students and the mediocre work of others who aren't reaching their potential.

By searching for trends, studying the clues, and asking good questions about the statistics, Doyle shows Barret's teachers where they might have missed the mark and how they can improve their aim in the future.

For example, Doyle compares the grades that every student earns in a particular subject with their scores on state and national tests in those subjects. If there's a mismatch, teachers can look at the sample test questions to see if they adequately reviewed the required topics in class, gave students enough practice answering different types of questions, or held students to lower standards than the testmakers.

In response, the school can make some thoughtful adjustments. To help students who scored in the novice category on the state's reading and writing tests, Barret placed them in a smaller than average class so they could get more attention from a teacher who has experience using varied instructional methods. The teacher also coordinates assignments with her colleagues so these students get additional practice reading and writing in subjects other than English.

Weekly reviews and regular adjustments

Barret's staff meets weekly to review the school's consolidated plan, checking to see if the strategies they've put in place are having the desired results. One problem they discovered was a lack of attention to "practical living," an area covered on the state CATS tests. To fit more relevant lessons into the curriculum, the staff created a family life class, organized targeted field trips, and built into the core curriculum some assignments on topics like drug abuse, relationships, and preparing a resume.

Another time teachers realized they had inadvertently left the study of electricity out of science classes and gave short shrift to the Westward expansion during U.S. history discussions. By analyzing the test results, teachers found the omissions and worked quickly to plug the gaps.

Principal Stuart Watts said Doyle's creative data analysis has "been extremely valuable" in helping the staff identify achievement patterns that they might not see by simply scanning a sheet of figures.

"It takes a while for teachers and everybody else to sort of grasp things from the information that you have," Watts said. "The first time you look at a set of statistics it may not mean as much as when you continue to look at it."

"We're really into equity now"

Doyle doesn't wait until researchers from the school district or the Kentucky Department of Education distribute all the reports and information she needs. She finds the data on her own.

To gauge the impact of poverty on student achievement, for example, she obtained block- by-block census data and correlated it with children's home addresses and test scores. After discovering that poverty - much more than race or gender - accounted for the school's lowest test scores, Barret's PTA acted to reduce some of the barriers to learning. Specifically, the PTA leaders set up a supply closet at school stocked with paper, markers, glue, and other materials that children might need, but can't afford, for their homework assignments.

"We're really into equity now," Doyle said. "We realize that there are different learning levels of kids out here. You can't just go to class and say, 'This is what I'm going to teach today,' and expect everyone to get an A."

Recently, Doyle began analyzing students' academic progress over time by reviewing their scores on multiple tests over a number of years - going all the way back to fourth grade. Although she's comparing the results of different tests, Doyle expects to identify trends that will give teachers a better idea of the impact they're having in the classroom.

"We call ourselves a family here. We all work together - or we try to," she said. "We don't point a finger at a particular person. We show them the data and say, 'This is what we need to do.' It's remarkable. It really does help our teachers see what's going on in our school."

Reading scores have soared

Doyle has developed two targeted projects to boost achievement at Barret. Both grew out of her involvement with the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership, an initiative of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, which trains Kentuckians to become advocates for better public schools and includes a training unit on using achievement data and other statistics to diagnose teaching and learning problems.

Doyle designed her first Commonwealth Institute project to raise Barret's scores in the arts and humanities section of the state tests. Working with the staff, she helped change the schedule so every sixth-grader would have a full complement of arts and humanities courses during the year. Older students would get extension courses instead of repeating material from previous years.

Her second project involves the Accelerated Reading program, which awards points to students based on their scores on computerized reading comprehension tests. Because students read books appropriate to their identified literacy levels, they can improve and earn recognition without being compared to students with greater or lesser skills. Teachers regularly post updated lists of the points each student has earned, and Mattingly encourages participation by keeping a chart in the library of each class's performance. Motivated students with limited literacy skills can and do make it to the top of the lists by reading a significant number of books and comprehending them, so the competition rewards effort and growth as well as high achievement.

Doyle's latest series of bar graphs shows that reading has soared throughout the school since she began tracking the progress last fall. It's just one more example of how schools can use statistics to help students learn, she said.

"I love crunching numbers and looking at data," Doyle said. "We're really excited about (getting) next year's scores to see the progress we've made."


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