Concord Student Test Scores Improve

The New Hampshire Department of Education released the results of the New England Common Assessment Program test scores for 2011 earlier this week and Concord school officials are pleased with what they are seeing, so far.

Concord School Superintendent Chris Rath put together a six-page memo for school board members and administrators on some of the preliminary data and will speak more specifically about it on Feb. 6.

“There’s a million pieces of data,” she said. “We’re pretty pleased with some of the overall results.”

Rath said the new numbers allow administrators to look at how students were performing during a number of years that they’ve been compiling data. For the current eighth-graders, for example, the school district can look at the overall test scores of most of these children since third-grade, to see how and what they’ve learned in math and reading. The more extensive data is not available just yet. The numbers will be computerized by Performance Plus software which will put the data into subgroups and see what drives the adequate yearly progress of students.

“That’s what we’ve been watching, to see if they’ve been improving,” Rath said.

Rath said New Hampshire students need to be proficient in math and reading by 2014, a lofty goal. But she's hopeful that the district will be able to reach that goal.

Currently, 87 percent of eighth-graders were ranked as proficient or better in reading. Close to 40 percent of eight-graders scored in the highest category of reading, proficient with distinction. And, of the 329 eight-graders who were tested in the fall, only nine were in the substantially below proficient category.

Rath said this data “really stuck out for us.” She added that there were 26 kids in the substantially below proficient category last year.

“So that’s progress,” she said. “We want to make them not only good readers but very good readers.”

While Rath was pleased with the reading results, with math, “we have more work to do … I don’t think we’re where we need to be” although there was also progress there too. She said they are trying some new things so over time, they may see better results. Rath said she thinks the difference today with math compared to the past is that it is less of a mechanical process of the rules and more of a mental one. She said the testing is done by giving the students word problems instead of the older method of handing tools to students to learn about the mathematical process.

“I don’t think we’re as good as we should be, in teaching kids that way,” she said. “We’re still teaching kids the traditional way and yet, they’re being asked to do things that are more complex than you and I had to do … it’s more complex, it should be, because the world is more complex than it used to be.”

Data from each student within the system and where they were before they came to Concord can also be cross-referenced, based on learning skills and levels of test scores, since not every student over a period of years was in the Concord system. However, Rath said, only Deerfield students are isolated from the data, since those students also attend Concord High School.

Some other highlights from the assessment test results: According to the scores, fifth-, sixth-, seventh- and eleventh-grade students are continuing to increase in numbers that are determined to be proficient or better in reading; seventh-grade math scores are about what they’ve been in previous years, although proficient with distinction had an increase by 7 percent; eleventh-graders increased by 2 percent. Seventy-seven percent of third-graders and 75 percent of fourth-graders performed in the two highest achievement levels in reading while 69 percent of both grades scored in the top levels of math.

In the , at Penacook Elementary, 79 percent third- to fifth-graders tested in the top two levels of reading while 68 percent were in the top two levels of math.