• Eric: Overall, this report shows impressive growth in student achievement from fall of 2021 to fall of 2022.
• Ethan: You'll notice this only pull students into the report who sat for the test in the fall 2021 and this year. Thus, students new to the school, particularly the approximately half of our 6th graders, are not part of this report. Since it is comparing last year to this year.
• Mark: In both math and reading, the outlier is the 6th grade group. What is happening in those classrooms to cause this gap?
• Eric: In terms of the RIT score for math, both the 7th and 8th grade score is a strong score for an incoming high school freshman. We would have been excited to receive students at RTHS with a 232 RIT Score.
• Ethan: You can see majority of students have grown consistently higher than the projected growth based on this 3rd party assessment taken by millions of students across the country. We feel confident this assessment is an accurate representation of student content knowledge.
• Eric: According to NWEA, "Unlike paper-and-pencil tests, where all students are asked the same questions and spend a fixed amount of time taking the test, MAP Growth is a computer-adaptive test. That means every student gets a unique set of test questions based on responses to previous questions. As the student answers correctly, questions get harder. If the student answers incorrectly, the questions get easier. By the end of the test, most students will have answered about half the questions correctly, as is common on adaptive tests. The purpose of MAP Growth is to determine what the student knows and how they are growing academically."
   

• Ethan: mClass focuses on early literacy skills, not comprehension. NCENSI is a mathematics skills screener.
• Ethan: The components assessed in mClass DIBLES
  • First Sound Fluency (FSF)
  • Letter Naming Fluency (LNF)*
  • Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF)
  • Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF)
  • DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF)
  • Daze
• Ethan: The assessment in terms of what has been presented to the committee only shows where students are starting the year. A baseline to watch as we get closer to 100% by the end of the year. When teachers drill down into the student data, the composite score is broken into the 6 domains listed. Teachers use this information to create small groups for instruction. The mClass platform also prescribes interventions teachers can use to address the specific fluency or nonsense word skills the particular student is struggling with based on the data.
• Ethan: Mathematics in upper elementary is the academic area where the data for Exploris has the biggest opportunity for growth. This is an area the school is focusing on providing additional academic support through its Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS). A team of 2 intervention staff members at the elementary school coordinate daily 30-minute intervention blocks of instruction with each grade-level. These 2 staff members deliver prescribed intervention based on benchmark testing results and teacher observation. 
• Ethan: For the 2022-2023 school year, a new school-wide schedule was implemented in the elementary school. This new schedule provides 30 minutes of intervention time Monday through Thursday, and the opportunity for grade-level teaching teams to meet with the Intervention Coordinator twice a month as Professional Learning Communities (PLC) to review student data. 
• Ethan: During these meetings, teachers analyze trends in student assessment scores, discuss intervention strategies and hold each other accountable for tracking student progress. We will also provide time during an upcoming elementary school campus-specific meeting for staff members to work in teams to create intervention plans. 
• Ethan: This goal of developing a consistent system of tiered intervention for academic instruction ties into the School Improvement Plan. This meets the stated goals by teachers in the Teacher Working Conditions Survey to align professional learning to students learning. The end result of this strategic approach to student learning will be the increase of end-of-grade proficiency scores, particularly in mathematics for 3rd, 4th and 5th grade. The data produced from these BOY assessments demonstrates these processes are working as intended to grow students and fill in academic gaps.

We decided to table this discussion given the bountiful conversation we had about BOY assessment data and the steps Exploris has taken to reorganize its approach to intervention, remediation and the continuum of services.