Daily Journal staff reports
Local schools made slight gains and losses on the statewide ISTEP test last school year, but officials are looking ahead to next year when the benchmark changes once again.
Each year, the state releases the results of the ISTEP exam that students in third through eighth grades take in the spring.
Results from last school year show some school districts made some gains in the percentage of students passing the math, English or both the math and English sections of the exam. Other school districts had scores they stayed nearly the same, or drop slightly.
Across the state, scores were steady across all subjects in grades 3 to 8, with slight increases in grade 8 English/language arts and grade 3 mathematics, according to a news release from the Indiana Department of Education.
“ISTEP+ is one of the many tools Indiana uses to measure student achievement and this year’s results indicate we are moving in the right direction,” Jennifer McCormick, Indiana superintendent of public instruction, said in the news release. “Indiana’s classrooms are full of dedicated educators who spend each day preparing our children for academic success, and I am grateful for their hard work.”
Schools across the state have criticized the ISTEP exam, and whether it is truly a good measure for how students are performing. And the state is working on a replacement exam that students will begin taking in the spring.
Local school officials say they do look at the scores as a way to assess their overall growth, but the test has been altered and changed so much in recent years, the data can’t truly show a long-term measurement.
“It is hard to compare your total pass rate within the school district long-term because the test has changed so much year to year,” Clark-Pleasant Superintendent Patrick Spray said.
And that is exactly what school officials hope to see in the new exam, coined ILEARN, that students will begin taking this spring.
“What is most important for our schools is that our state assessment be very consistent for many years,” Center Grove Assistant Superintendent Jack Parker said.
“If we can get that, we will be able to continue to grow our students.”
Parker is excited to get a new benchmark with the new exam, so the school district can begin comparing scores to past years, and one day be able to look at how students are doing, compared to how they were doing five to six years prior, he said.
Officials are also hopeful the data will come back in a timely manner so teachers can use it to prepare for the next school year, which hasn’t been the case with the ISTEP exam, Edinburgh Schools Superintendent Doug Arnold said. Having that data is important to being able to help students moving forward, he said.
School officials have been learning from the state what the new format of the test will be, and sharing that information with teachers so they can prepare their students for the exam this spring.
One change in the exam is that it will be computer-adaptive, meaning that the test will select students’ questions based on how well they know the knowledge, said Lisa Harkness, Greenwood schools director of curriculum, instruction and assessment.
For example, if a student answers a question correctly, the program will begin to ask more difficult questions to try to gauge how much the student knows. If the student answers a question incorrectly, the test will ask less difficult questions, she said.
“This is very different from what we have seen in the past,” she said.
Students will also get as much time as needed to take the exam, instead of having certain windows of time for sections of the test, she said.
The test is similar to other exams schools have been taking for years to help measure progress of their students throughout the schoolyear, with one key difference — the test only measures a student’s knowledge at their grade level, which doesn’t give schools as much information as other assessments they do, Clark-Pleasant assistant superintendent Cameron Rains said.
Parents and the community will need to be prepared for the scores to be different from past years, because the test is different, Rains said. That has been a challenge in the past as the ISTEP exam has repeatedly changed.
But one way schools can use the results is to compare their passing percentage with other school districts across the state, Spray said. For Clark-Pleasant, the data shows a 10 percent gain in the last four years, compared with other schools, he said.
The data also gives some indication that what schools are changing is helping, school officials said.
At Franklin schools, for example, officials saw they needed to provide more support to certain students labeled as fragile learners from the data and began looking for ways to do that, Superintendent David Clendening said. That will be something that instructional coaches, which the school district added this year, will be able to help with, he said.
Greenwood Schools Superintendent Kent DeKoninck also thinks the ISTEP data helps prove that the interventions they have done with students, and professional development teachers have done have helped, he said.
And at Indian Creek schools, the data shows students are moving in the right direction, with scores improving, reflecting their focus in recent years to focus on math, and also doing more remediation and tiered instruction in English, Superintendent Tim Edsell said.
Their goal is to reach an 80 percent passing rate, he said. Last year, more than 70 percent of students passed either the math or English section, and more than 60 percent passed both.
“We’re not there, but that’s what we are striving for,” Edsell said.
What will happen in future years is the question officials aren’t sure about yet.
“We have no idea until we take the test how well students will do. All we can do is study, plan and prepare for it the best we can,” Parker said.
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See the scores from all Johnson County schools.
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