District Testing Coordinator Says Scores are on the Right Track

During the last school year, education officials made a push to try to increase student scores on state standardized tests. During the school board meeting late last week, they heard about general results from the NJ ASK and HSPA and saw that scores improved in most areas.

District Testing Coordinator Rory McCourt addressed the and the public Thursday with the district assessment report. He outlined how employees engaged in staff development, gave students NJ ASK primers and offered incentives for success.

In order to succeed in the long-run, McCourt said the district needs to increase academic rigor, revise the curriculum district-wide and focus on best practices while also engaging students in explicit test preparation.

McCourt also stressed that standardized tests shouldn't be the only method of measuring student success. He said the district has its own assessments, such as projects, portfolios and research papers.

"I think the NJ ASK is a good test and it's a fair test, but it measures a narrow focus of what we'd like a student to learn throughout the course of an entire year," McCourt said.

While he said he favors having multiple forms of assessment, he recognizes that the district must work to improve students' scores as well. Efforts have seemingly been successful when comparing scores from the 2009-2010 school year to 2010-2011. In language arts and math, students performed better than their counterparts in the district factor group, which compares similar districts.

McCourt also compared students by cohort, which follows one group as they advance from grade to grade. In many instances, the cohorts improved from year to year, but there were some slight decreases for fifth- and sixth-graders in the advanced proficient area.

"We can target, and we will target, our staff development around trying to increase the advanced proficient numbers for these students," McCourt said. "That is the true purpose of the NJ ASK."

He said while there were a few pockets of areas he'd like to improve, he said overall the district is "trending pretty positively."

McCourt also gave a few highlights. He said 100 percent of the fourth-graders at scored proficient or higher on the math portion of the NJ ASK. Fifty-eight percent of third-graders at and 52 percent at scored advanced proficient in math.

Going forward, McCourt said officials will work to maintain the higher scores achieved in the spring and work to improve in the areas where scores can be better.

He also hopes to weave test preparation into the classroom on a daily basis.

"We want to embed more test prep into the everyday curriculum," McCourt said. "I think we need to find a way to work smarter, not harder at this so we're preparing our kids throughout the course of the school year in preparation for the test so it's not an overwhelming process that dominates too much of what they do."

He also said the district needs to focus on multiple measures of student achievement, especially since the state has set benchmarks for adequately yearly progress on the NJ ASK that requires 86 percent of students to pass for 2011-2013 and 100 percent to pass in 2014. McCourt said he didn't think the district would reach 100 percent passing because there are "too many variables."

To see McCourt's presentation, click on the PDF at the right.