If taking a standardized test is comparable to learning a different language, then Springfield Public School students are generally not yet as fluent as their statewide peers.
Results from the 2022 Missouri Assessment Program show most SPS grade-level and end-of-course proficiency scores hover at or below state averages.
But district leaders believe they have a Rosetta Stone of sorts to help educators better prepare students for the kinds of questions and material they’ll see each May when they’re taking the MAP. The resource, a universal screening system called Galileo, is designed to help teachers spot learning gaps and strengths over the course of three testing sessions during the school year. At a time when students at SPS seek to address severe COVID-19 pandemic-era learning losses, district leaders called Galileo a necessary investment.
The tool is also available for teachers to use throughout the year as part of the district’s $2.1-million contract with educational technology company Imagine Learning. At Tuesday’s Springfield Board of Education meeting, teachers and principals from three schools — Bissett Elementary, Hickory Hills Middle and Parkview High — shared how they used Galileo across the school year to help more of their students become proficient or advanced learners. Students grew more comfortable taking standardized tests in the process. Ideally, some teachers said, that growth will be reflected in MAP scores.
SPS students took their first post-Galileo state assessments in May, and those results won’t be released for months. But Nicole Holt, deputy superintendent of academics, and Crystal Magers, executive director of academics, led their presentation on Galileo with a look at the 2021-2022 school year’s MAP and ACT scores, and how they stack up compared to state averages.
There’s work to be done to improve many scores, they said. They are using data collected from nearly 114,000 Galileo assessments to help drive how training, instruction and curriculum could change to better serve students. They’re also looking at school building-specific success stories that are apparent in the Galileo data, which is why principals and educators from the three schools joined the June 13 board meeting.
‘So much of test success, I feel like, is test language’
Across the district, all K-12 students took beginning-, middle- and end-of-year assessments with the system. However, educators have the liberty to use Galileo with students throughout the year. That allowed teachers in the ninth-grade English language arts department at Parkview High School to quiz students before and after a test. After analyzing data collected by the Galileo system, the teachers realized they needed to do some extra work with ninth graders on the concept of inference.
“We created a three-week unit that focused on inference, had them take an assessment again, and could see that incredible growth,” said Tiffany Taylor, a ninth-grade English teacher at Parkview.
To fellow teacher Cameron Short, the repetitions helped students grow familiar with the assessment system, whose developers have said will help students be better prepared for state standardized tests.
“So much of test success, I feel like, is test language,” Short said. “We might be testing them and going over the standards, but until they see the questions and how they’re going to be asked … I don’t think they’ll be as successful.”
Megan Brown, who was an assistant principal at Parkview last school year, said the team focused on alignment curriculum and intentional, instructional feedback.
“I have told them many many times, they were the team that took the feedback and it was immediately implemented into the classroom,” Brown said.
Brown will become principal at Parkview in July.
Hearing directly from educators
Their points were among several that resonated with board members, who for the second time in the process of deploying Galileo across the district, heard directly from educators at elementary, middle and high school levels about their experiences.
By the end of the school year, 92.6 percent of ninth graders at Parkview met or exceeded their expected growth in knowledge and scored proficient and advanced in English language arts. It was an improvement of 46.1 percent compared to the Galileo assessment given at the beginning of the school year, and a level of progress Parkview will seek to replicate at higher grade levels.
Convincing high school students, and seniors in particular, to give their all on a test that doesn’t count toward their GPA is a perpetual struggle for teachers. Short said showing students the data and celebrating gains helped get more ninth-graders invested in their growth. Taylor said freshmen developed a level of comfort over time with a system set up to model a standardized test.
“Our students weren’t scared, I guess, of the testing system,” Taylor said.
“If we can teach the processes of what we just learned from Parkview, then we can actually move the data,” Holt said. “And so that work of creating sound and solid processes is timely.”
What that means for this year’s state standardized test scores remains to be seen. But after looking at a set of charts comparing the district’s 2022 Missouri Assessment Program scores to statewide results, board members are eager to find out.
MAP data shows SPS students lag behind many state averages
District-level MAP and end-of-course data showed year-over-year improvements in most math grade levels and courses but showed improvement only in two of seven English language arts areas. (The entire presentation is available online.)
SPS third through fifth graders kept pace with the state average of ELA-proficient students (43.2 percent state to 42.6 percent SPS), while sixth through eighth graders outperformed state averages (43.4 percent to 40 percent).
SPS students in grades 3-8 fall below statewide averages in math. In science courses, third through fifth graders trail state averages by 1.4 percentage points (40.6 percent to 39.2 percent). In grades 6-8, district and state proficiency levels are close to identical (37.9 percent statewide to 39.7 percent at SPS).
In every end-of-course high school assessment except geometry, SPS trails state averages.
Board member Maryam Mohammadkhani said she wished she had scores from the most recent MAP testing period, held in May, now to see if district-wide Galileo use has resulted in better statewide assessment scores. One of the teachers before the board exclaimed, “Me too!” in response.
What board members did get Tuesday night was a report from Superintendent Grenita Lathan. Lathan explained the report she passed to board members, which has not been made publicly available, uses a mixture of district and state data to determine an SPS school’s performance level. Schools that rank in the bottom 5 percent of SPS campuses — Lathan named Holland Elementary as one — must develop a turnaround plan. Lathan said the board would do a deeper dive regarding the report in August.
Becky Ash, principal at Hickory Hills, said the school improvement plan led her and other academic leaders to examine end-of-year data and decide, “what do we need to do next.” Her school’s steps will be finalized in August.
Ash and math teacher Heather Killian shared some of the strategies that led 11 percent more of the seventh-grade math students at Hickory Hills to become advanced or proficient learners over the year, according to Galileo stats.
Charting improved scores
Killian said she put up a chart in her room. It showed learning areas where students were succeeding or underperforming, and it allowed Killian to point to some of the red and say they hadn’t covered that in class yet. Their knowledge would develop, she told her students, and their scores would improve.
“Kids started taking ownership of their own learning,” Ash said. “They knew what they were expected to learn and they were ready to step up and show that they could do it.”
At Bissett Elementary, nearly all grade levels improved their mastery of English and math skills over the year. Over a quarter more fifth-grade students finished the year as proficient or advanced in math, and Erica Rosenbaum, Bissett’s principal, credited teachers with building learning paths forward with the data they got from Galileo early on.
“Really it was about coming around the data and collaborating,” Rosenbaum said. “The data gave us a good starting point — from Galileo — to dive deeper into the standards.”
When asked by board member Steve Makoski if there was initial resistance to a new universal screener — Galileo replaced another one, i-Ready — Hailey Bieler, a learning coach at Bissett, said there was “major pushback.” Bieler said the Bissett staff focused on what was already going well, and also on areas that needed improvement. Student buy-in bolstered staff buy-in.
“Kids were crying because they were so excited that they met their goals,” she said. “We had not had that before.”
Whether or not Galileo and other efforts translate to improved state assessment remains to be seen, but it's being closely monitored.
