Using Standardized Assessments to Drive Instruction

As a K-12 school, David Posnack Jewish Day School has a unique opportunity to use assessments to analyze the academic curriculum at all grade levels. When standardized testing or summative assessments identify areas in which students demonstrate a specific weakness or lack of prerequisite knowledge, Posnack teachers are able to use this data not only to remediate instruction, but to proactively ensure that academic gaps are closed before moving forward to the higher level grades.

This approach is most easily illustrated by the change that took place in Posnack’s lower school (K-5) math curriculum over the last three years. The school administers standardized testing twice a year to all students in the lower school and middle school for the purpose of tracking student progress and to assist in determining appropriate class placement. Using an adaptive norm-referenced assessment provides valuable data for teachers, including individual growth projections and normative group data to compare student performance with others outside of the school population.

Several years ago, standardized testing results indicated that many middle school students were lacking key foundational math skills, specifically in the area of operations and number systems. Lower school students were similarly scoring below the desired mean in areas of number sense, operations and algebraic thinking. Classroom observations and assessments in both the elementary and middle grades also determined that a large percentage of students were unable to consistently apply previously learned problem-solving strategies to multistep word problems. As the movement towards greater rigor and relevance in math education was taking hold, addressing these issues was particularly important to the leadership at Posnack. The concern was that not addressing these areas of weakness would ultimately affect the students’ success in high school level algebra and beyond.

The lower school math curriculum was then reviewed to determine how to best address these deficiencies and for which specific grade level(s) intervention would be most successful. The decision was made to implement a more rigorous math curriculum for the entire lower school by introducing Singapore Math strategies and changing the instructional methodology for problem solving. This new method of delivering math instruction focused on a constructivist approach to teaching mathematics whereby students were actively engaged in the lessons and used concrete and pictorial representations to solve word problems. An emphasis was also placed on the importance of all students discovering for themselves, which strategies and computational methods worked best for their individual learning preferences. In essence, teachers no longer delivered a “one size fits all” approach to teaching mathematics, but rather encouraged students to think through the problem-solving process and combine together their existing knowledge and newly acquired skills as they searched for solutions.

After only two years of implementing these changes to the math curriculum, this teaching methodology has translated into a measurable increase in both standardized assessment scores as well as classroom assessment grades. Even more important is the change in students’ attitudes and perceptions of their math abilities. This positive approach to learning mathematics at the lower grade levels is encouraging, and we believe that the benefits will continue to unfold as the students work their way towards higher-level math courses.