Yesterday, my students took their science benchmark. I ran the scantrons through and uploaded the scores to Eduphoria. It was not what I hoped for. However, after surviving my pity party, I got proactive about coming up with a plan for the whole class and a plan for each individual student. Planning for whole class review by looking at data is fairly obvious, so I want to tell you about how I planned for individual students.
Looking at the scores as a large group, I was not happy. BUT, when I started to look at each child’s growth over the year, I was pretty impressed. No students started the year at a passing rate. Now, we are much higher. (I do not get specific with the passing rates and student scores on The Science Penguin because I would like to maintain some privacy for me and my students.) Most students who did not make the passing standard are within 10 points. Totally doable.
With 21 instructional days until Science STAAR, there is actually time for my kiddos to make progress if we target the right concepts and skills. For each individual, I determined the concepts that were not mastered using Eduphoria, our district data system.
I had to go through each student’s data and look at the percent of questions answered incorrectly for each standard. I also looked at each reporting category to see what the strength is. I made a document with 6 boxes per page and listed the student’s name, strength, and 4-7 concepts to work on. To select the concepts to work on, I considered which standards are tested most often as well as the percent answered correctly.
Tomorrow, we will go over the benchmark test and students will complete the page shown below with whether they missed the question or answered correctly. I included the concept the question tested in each box to make it easier for them to analyze. Download this file on GoogleDocs.
Then, each student will graph their score and see where they fall. They will list 5 things they did well on and 5 things they need to work on. Then, they will explain how they feel about the test.
When I meet with each student, I will give them the paper that I prepared and glue that onto their page. Then, we will look at which things they will work on during their independent station review after Spring Break.
By doing this, I hope that students take ownership of their learning and feel that success IS POSSIBLE!