Thursday, August 2, 2007
North Routt Charter School Director Colleen Poole said she's pleased with the school's Colorado Student Assessment Program test scores.
"We did very well in reading with 100 percent of our students proficient in (grades) five to eight," she said.
Poole noted that to make conclusions based on CSAP scores about a school's performance is disingenuous because small class sizes result in one underperforming student significantly affecting achievement percentages.
"For instance, if you have only two students at a grade level and one does well and the other does not, you are at 50 percent proficient," she said. "If you look at the scores for our current sixth-graders, who would have been fourth graders in 2005, their performance has increased."
In 2005, 50 percent of the charter school's fourth-graders were advanced or proficient in math. In 2007, that number is now 100 percent.
"Our goal is to have all students proficient in all areas by the time they leave us in eighth grade," Poole said. "We are finding that students who have been with us for two or more years are well on their way, and we intend to keep the momentum flowing."
Steamboat Springs — The South Routt School District mostly outpaced state averages on the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests.
South Routt middle and high school principal James Chamberlin said he is most pleased with eighth- and 10th-grade science scores.
"We are well above the state average," he said. "Overall, we feel the secondary - seventh through 10th-grade scores - are strong. The areas we focus on, areas of math and writing, saw scores go up compared to previous years."
The percentage of South Routt eighth-graders who were proficient or advanced in science was 70 percent, which is 18 points higher than the state average. Fifty-nine percent of 10th graders were proficient or advanced in science, which is 11 points higher than the state average.
Chamberlin said administrators typically prefer to compare student scores from year to year, which are called cohort groups, rather than by grade level. For example, the math scores of ninth-graders are compared to their scores last year as eighth-graders.
"What's difficult to do with the data coming from the state is that it isn't true cohort data," he said. "I wouldn't draw any conclusions because the data from the state hasn't been combed out yet."
Chamberlin said he looks at individual student performance from year to year.
The movement from year to year of the number of students who scored unsatisfactory also is an important component, Chamberlin said.
At the secondary level, the number of unsatisfactory students from the four cohort groups declined in seven of 12 categories, while three categories saw no change and two saw an increase.
The largest decrease in the number of unsatisfactory students was in eighth-grade math, where three students were unsatisfactory, compared to 21 students when the cohort group was in seventh grade.
"My overall conclusion is that I was pleased with the scores," Chamberlin said. "But we have two areas of concern we are going to work on."
He said he was disappointed in seventh-grade math and ninth-grade writing scores, which were both far below the state averages.
