September’s webinar, held Thursday night, was to help the public understand student achievement data. (Photo from Shutterstock)
A state education group wants the public to know how to look through student data and decipher what it means, just a couple weeks after the state released its test scores, which are once again very low.
Thursday’s meeting was the latest in a series of monthly webinars intended to engage the community, hosted by First State Educate.
The session was called “Understanding Student Achievement Data,” and explained how to interpret Delaware students’ performance data by school district and grade level.
Those in the audience said they wanted to learn more about student data in order to talk to teachers or staff, construct and suggest positive changes within their child’s school and more.
Both Yvonne Johnson, the group’s school board consultant, and Julia Keleher, chief strategy and operating officer, pointed out that test scores are a screenshot in time and doesn’t always give a fair representation of a student, but it’s still helpful.
They also explained the difference between formative and summative assessments – formative are ongoing assessments through the learning process to monitor a student’s progress with feedback.
Summative assessments are given at the end of a unit or course to evaluate the student’s overall learning and achievement.
Terri Hodges, a professor at Wilmington University speaking on behalf of First State Educate, said standardized assessments, grades, growth, grade point averages and graduation rates as key metrics to student achievement.
A large part of the meeting was Hodges showing the group how to navigate the Delaware State Report Card, which is a one-stop-shop for math and English language arts proficiency, chronic absentee rates, demographics, enrollment, college/career readiness, graduation rates, dropout rates, class size, teacher retention and more.
Delaware State Report Card
Chronic absenteeism is the percentage of students who miss 10% or more of all school days in a given school year. In Delaware, that’s about one in five students who are chronically absent.
The report card breaks down these categories by individual school.
Thursday’s speakers also took a deeper look at data, such as how different grades fared in proficiency.
For example, Delaware’s fifth graders had the highest English language arts proficiency, yet sixth grade was the lowest.
They also disaggregated data by race, which showed that minorities like Blacks and Hispanics/Latinos have lower proficiency rates than white students.
First State Educate’s next informative webinar is Wednesday, Oct. 9 at 5:30 p.m. and will be about school board accountability frameworks.
Raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Jarek earned a B.A. in journalism and a B.A. in political science from Temple University in 2021. After running CNN’s Michael Smerconish’s YouTube channel, Jarek became a reporter for the Bucks County Herald before joining Delaware LIVE News.
