No members of the public attended the meeting aside from Chloe Ruff, education professor at Gettysburg College, invited to participate in the agenda.

Chloe Ruff teaches education in education department at Gettysburg College. Her department offers secondary education certification (by subject) and students use the department's statistics course as part of their math requirement. The course, Applied Statistics: Classroom Assessment and Educational Research, also addresses the foundations of assessment in addition to its treatment of statistics and educational research. Thirteen students are enrolled in Dr. Ruff's course this semester.

Because Dr. Ruff's course is working on assessment alongside statistics, Gburg college students are being asked to consider: how are K-12 students assessed? how do teachers collect data? how does teacher know if student is making progress? Dr. Ruff's students are interviewing every teacher at Vida Charter School. Their questions have sparked additional questions in Vida staff PLCs. The interviews have been good for Gburg students because it gives them a chance to talk more with someone who is in the classroom and doing the work of assessment.

Class project: data-driven decision making in the elementary classroom. The Gburg students will be work dependent on what Vida would like to learn. Gburg's goal is to have a presentation back to AE in December.

This project will explore Vida's NWEA and PSSA instruments with a focus on the math at Vida's request. Math is a focus because it is an area of strong interest for Vida and a natural connection to another departmental course taught by KMiyazawa. Gburg students will seek to describe: What data is NWEA giving Vida? What is the focus of the test? What types of questions does it ask? The students do the same work on the PSSA. Time permitting, students will look at connections between the tests and Vida's curriculum? CMaldonado suggests Alex Schuh as a resource for students. Students in the course are already underway with test item analysis work.

Goal: look conceptually at PSSA and NWEA tests. Students will explore the test and the data behind the test. - Is there a correlation between students who do well on PSSAs and students who do well on NWEA? - Could we look at whether there is an area of PSSA or NWEA that the general Vida population is having trouble with? Does this change for historically under-represented students? Are there outliers for HUS? - Is there a gender effect in math? Data analysis done last year may indicate that length of time at Vida seems to be predictive of scores. It isn't clear yet that there is a gender effect, but the recent PSSAs provide a larger sample size (more data) due to higher upper grades enrollment.

Vida has asked the Gburg students to provide insight into the following question (posed by other schools in the state as well). - How is the PSSA math test connected to how the standards are filtering through Vida's curriculum? Vida's curriculum is based on the Common Core. PA Core does not follow Common Core with high fidelity. For example, in the Common Core language arts, the term "fiction" is used; the PA Core uses a different term term for fiction (fantasy?) that Vida students may not recognize as PA intends. In math, some topics are not presented at the same grade levels in PA Core and Common Core.

Chloe Ruff is managing IRB requirements.

Discussion items included the following. 1) Is there a connection between Chloe Ruff’s project and ongoing work that AE needs to do in solidifying ongoing systems to monitor student academic performance? 2) Could we say that in some cases the NWEA is more reflective of student growth than PSSA? Or not? 3) One outcome of the Gburg project can be to get a recommendation about a sensible way to measure Vida student academic performance in math. 4) AE has discussed tracking student progress quantitatively. There could be valid qualitative measures of performance, like portfolios, that show student progress. This could be an item for this committee to focus on fin 2016-17. Explore use in Spanish classes where there isn’t an end of year test? Look at qualitative assessment data as a way to add to how Vida looks at student achievement.

GOALS PROPOSED FOR 2015-2016. 1. Build a school-wide report based on student progress on the NWEAs. This report should contain key instructional areas the staff AE has identified as relevant to students’ success, including metrics and targets for student academic progress. 2. Devise a school-wide mechanism for quarterly tracking of student achievement based on report card performance. Identify metrics and targets for student academic progress over 3 and 5 year periods. 3a. Use staff AE input to articulate key differences between Common Core (U.S.) and the PA Core. 3b. Consider and document implications for PSSAs and school performance scores, using understanding to set appropriate metrics and targets for student academic progress. 3c. Make a recommendation to the board for how the Common Core (U.S. and PA) will be managed at Vida; how the PA Core will drive or interact with Vida's curriculum; and, if/how the board should resource changes in Vida’s current programming priorities.