By Faith Zantua, Co-News Editor
Third, fourth and fifth grade classes are piloting the math i-Ready Diagnostic Assessment this fall as part of the district’s ongoing implementation of K-8 math benchmark tests by the 2027-28 school year.
In the 2022-23 school year, district math curriculum supervisor Dr. John Mull and the math standing committee, a group of staff members who routinely review the district’s math curriculum, discussed the benefits of implementing math benchmarks that assess a student’s math knowledge. Mull feels that in addition to the current unit-based and standardized state assessments, the benchmarks help provide more information to teachers about their students’ progress.
“Teachers see reports of actionable data of (what students know), which helps them understand needs and with planning instruction,” Mull said. “An advantage to this is I can make actionable decisions during the year (if I was a teacher), as I know what’s happening in my classroom. When I see the results in my class, I have better contextual understanding.”
Since the 2022-23 school year, the then-newly created math benchmark committee, consisting of Mull and various math related staff, has met to assess potential math assessments based on each grade’s needs, choose which ones to pilot and determine what tests to administer officially.
In each elementary school, at least one first and second grade teacher administered a potential benchmark to students twice during the 2023-24 school year. At the end of the year, teachers provided feedback on the piloted tests, and the committee chose the assessments that first and second grade classes across the district are taking this year: Renaissance Learning’s FastBridge earlyMath Assessment for first graders and Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Diagnostic Assessment for second graders.
Linda Krause is a math support teacher at Valley Forge Elementary School and helped students that used the pilot benchmarks last year.
“I get the reports also, so then I can look at students that might need to have some support in a class,” Krause said. “It helps us to target whatever skills we might want to be working with those students. It does have some materials that we can use to help us, suggestions of materials, and then I also can use curriculum materials.”
The committee will go through similar processes when choosing the assessments for higher grades. New Eagle Elementary School teacher Heidi Waterman is piloting a math benchmark test for fourth graders. She hopes to use the results to assign students to groups based on what overall knowledge they need support on.
“It’ll be nice for us to see that breakdown of skill and where the kids were successful and where they still need help compared to the chapter tests,” Waterman said. “I think the kids will be getting a lot more questions than just their 12-question chapter test. I’m hoping it gives a more in-depth analysis of what they know and don’t know.”
Students take the official benchmark assessments three times per school year during the fall, winter and spring.
“We’re excited to see, to learn from this,” Mull said. “We want it to be worth the class time and what we can learn to do.”
Faith Zantua can be reached at [email protected].
