Section 1: Academic Achievement - National Center for School ...

left the room they knew they would have to know and understand the difference between the
oral pronunciation of “thirteen” and “thirty.” Spanish-speaking students typically struggle
with this concept because the words sound identical to them.
The district math assessments proved to be a challenge. Due to miscommunication received
by many school principals, it was hard to retract the tests and simply not use them. Our
district math and assessment coordinators were in the process of changing the assessments for
the upcoming year, yet our math program was stuck with using these tests for this year.
Alarmed at the prospect of using a flawed data along with a test that gave an incomplete
picture of my students’ mathematical knowledge, I sought ways to identify students’ strengths
and weaknesses in math lab on a daily basis. As their math lab teacher, I needed a reliable
way to gauge progress and adjust my teaching style to meet their needs. I decided that I
needed to identify their strengths and weaknesses using a standards-based data driven system.
Ideally, the system would document individual students’ progress and achievement of the
math standards that Title Math Lab was helping them address. Unfortunately, there was no
software available to our school to do this, nor was there enough time to research programs,
secure funding, and garner approval from the district and principal. So, what I did was set up
folders for each student which contained a checklist of state and district math standards. Then
I included samples of their work as they met each standard. I dated the assessment and
recorded the student’s proficiency status. When a student passed, or showed proficiency on
the benchmark, I dated the checklist. This system, along with my anecdotal notes from group,
guided my instruction and proved to be effective for me as a teacher. At parent/teacher
conferences in the spring, I shared data with parents, who were grateful to see their student’s
actual work. One parent indicated that she now understood this “new” grading system with
the numbers (standards-based grading) better than ever before because it was accompanied by
examples of student work.
The next aspect of the data puzzle to be addressed was the formal assessment piece of
language learners. I decided early on that students needed to be monitored for language
acquisition as well as math standards on formal tests. The Richardson assessments are all
oral. The district tests are written, flawed, and limited in scope. I had my everyday informal
Action Research to Study Homelessness and High Mobility in School Communities 74