Author Spotlight
Luke Beil
East Kansas State Assessment test scores have dropped after the COVID-19 pandemic. With students learning through a screen and not being able to take the assessments during the 2020-21 school year, East has developed a plan to get them back on track.
“We’re in the human services business and when you don’t have human beings in front of you, learning can slow down a whole lot,” Assistant Principal Kristoffer Barikmo said. “I think our test scores proved that.”
The Kansas Assessment is reported in four different levels, with level one showing a student has a limited understanding of the subject and level four showing a student has an excellent understanding of the subject.
In the 2018-19 school year, 44.01% of students were in the level three range for the ELA portion and only 7.89% in the level one range. However, in the 2020-21 school year, 32.31% of students scored in the level three range and the percentage of students in the level one range tripled to 21.88%. Similar statistics were shown in the math assessment.
SMSD has developed a plan involving resources like Delta Math for high schoolers and IXL for middle schoolers — these two online math programs help strengthen students’ abilities in math by quizzing them.
“We got access to different resources that we now have the ability to use and purchase to make some of those gains back academically,” Barikmo said. “These are resources that we didn’t have access to before COVID.”
Along with utilizing key learning resources, teaching in the classroom has also changed. Teachers have had to take in a style of teaching that focuses on assessing and re-teaching in hopes that every student will understand the subjects thoroughly.
“If we do that across every course, our State Assessment data will reflect that, our ACT data will reflect that, our school performance data will reflect that,” Barikmo said.
This new plan seems to be working according to Barikmo. Although the official numbers aren’t public information yet, he says East has already seen a rise in assessment scores in 2022.
In order to further test score improvements, teachers have formed Professional Learning Community teams within their subjects. They meet once a week to exchange ideas for strengthening their teaching and assess things like quizzes and tests to determine how their classes are going.
“[Professional learning communities] used to consist of lesson planning together, and now it’s more of, ‘Are they getting it? What do we do when they don’t get it? And how can we help them get it?’” English teacher Ann Flurry said.
According to Flurry, there are some negative effects to the concept of assessing and re-teaching such as a slower process of getting through the class syllabus and having to put aside other independent forms of teaching.
“I feel it’s a necessary evil because mastery is what we want to get to in subject matter,” Flurry said. “I think a detriment to that is that we have to put aside more enriching projects and more real life learning assignments.”
According to Head principal Jason Peres, East has adequately prepared students to score higher assessments. He believes that another reason scores were lower in the past was due to students not always understanding why they were doing the assessment.
“It is still a test for which students are not held accountable, therefore students need to understand the purpose behind it,” Peres said. “That’s always been our challenge.”
Teachers who administer the assessments are now explaining the purpose of them to students and even Peres himself has visited ELA classes to express to students why they should take the tests seriously. Peres believes it is vital because it exhibits that Shawnee Mission East is one of the top schools in Kansas.
“A single test can never be a measure of how well a school, community or student is doing academically,” Barikmo said. “They’re snapshots in time that give us a sense of how a student is doing.”
Leave a Reply