Wiesbaden High School

Student Performance Data Document

Current CSI leadership started their tenure with extensive data analysis at the beginning of school year 2011-2012. The faculty as a whole, and in committee, made the following findings pertinent to our two school goals involving reading and critical thinking. While the overview of our TerraNova results from the previous year did not suggest any particular area of focus for our school goals

When the data was disaggregated by gender and ethnicity, reading was discovered to be an area of concern. Our largest gender gap, and our largest ethnicity gap, was in the area of reading. Improving reading skills and closing these two gaps is one of our school goals.

Further inspiration for areas of focus was found when the data was analyzed at the Objectives Performance Index (OPI) level. The analysis of math OPI scores, across fixed grade levels and longitudinally, revealed that the area of problem solving and reasoning was regularly among the weaker half of sub skills for all students (example from the junior class below). The threeyear longitudinal trend data for the test takers who had been with us the longest (our juniors) was particularly interesting. Improving critical thinking skills is one of our school goals.

For our reading goal, we identified students with 2011 TerraNova scores indicating that they needed additional assistance improving their reading skills. Each of these students was placed in one of four special seminars that focused on reading skills. A box plot comparing the 2011 and 2012 reading scores of only these students is shown below. All students in our special reading seminars scored below the 50th percentile in 2011. In 2012, a full 25% of these same students now scored above the 50th percentile. Additionally, nearly half of the scores from 2012 were better than 75% of the scores from 2011.

At the start of SY 2012-2013, we replaced the reading-seminar intervention with an aggressive READ-180 Enrollment intervention. All students with TerraNova reading scores at or below the 40th percentile were automatically placed in a READ 180 class. This aggressive enrollment policy increased READ-180 participation over 900%. A boxplot comparing the 2012 and 2013 scores of these READ-180 students is shown below. All of the scores from 2012 were below the national average, while nearly half of the scores from 2013 were above the national average. Additionally, a full 75% of the scores from 2013 were superior to half of the scores from 2012.

The 17-point TerraNova gender reading gap that caught our attention back in 2011 decreased substantially the following two years. Over that same time period, the ethnicity gap also decreased by 23 percent.

In addition to using TerraNova reading scores, we also monitor our gender and ethnicity gaps with PSAT reading scores from sophomores and juniors. PSAT scores also show that both the gender and ethnicity gaps have decreased from 2011 to 2013.

A third measure of our gender gap and ethnic gap comes from the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI). This school-wide metric is new to WHS, and its biannual administration became a fixed feature of our assessment calendar only this year. While the results below also show a reduction in the gender gap, the ethnicity gap, by this metric, is unimproved. This assessment tool will become more valuable and more telling as its fidelity improves with regular fixed dates on our assessment calendar.

Percentage at or Above Grade Level Scholastic Reading Inventory

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Female Male

Spring 2013 94 88

Fall 2013 89 84

Percentage at or Above Grade Level Scholastic Reading Inventory

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Black Asian Mixed White

Spring 2013 84 86 78 93

Fall 2013 72 84 79 92

Two of our SRI assessment dates for this school year have already passed (start-of-year, and mid-year). The matched-pairs data below indicates that the average improvement for the targeted students in our two interventions (READ 180 and Special Reading Seminar) is greater than the expected average improvement. The mean lexile improvement of 54.19 points is statistically significant at the 5% significance level (p = 0.029) when tested against a typical halfyear lexile improvement of 12.5 points.

SRI
Reading Intervention Students Only Post-Test Score minus Pre-Test Score

Change in score from start of year to mid-year 2013-14

In addition to using three data sources to monitor our reading goal, we also use three data sources to monitor our critical-thinking goal. While the summary statistics from the TerraNova and the PSAT do not measure critical thinking directly, sub scores from each exam do provide such a measure. Here is our definition of Critical Thinking:

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following:

understand the logical connections between ideas identify, construct and evaluate arguments detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning solve problems systematically identify the relevance and importance of ideas reflect on the justification of one's own beliefs and values

The problem-solving and reasoning math OPI from the TerraNova provides a measure of skills mentioned above. We have seen a slight decrease in this measurement among our sophomores, and larger gains among our freshmen and juniors.

The PSAT provides several sub scores that speak directly to the critical thinking skills outlined above. The slides below indicate that, by this measure, students have not made progress with critical-thinking skills. This has inspired us to adopt a new intervention, Costas Levels of Questioning, which we adopted school-wide at the start of SY 2013-2014. Costas Levels of Questioning has been a feature of our professional-development days this school year, and it has become a feature of our classrooms this year as well.

Our third measure of critical thinking comes from the local assessment taken by all of our seniors (the only class for which we have no PSAT or TerraNova data). Our local exam consists of four constructed-response questions (three designated hard, one medium) taken from the NAEP question bank (at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/). The pretest is taken within the first three weeks of school and the posttest is taken just after AP exams. Tests are sorted to ensure that only students for whom both pretest and posttest scores are available are included in the data set below. Tests are then shuffled and graded by the math-department chair to ensure that the NAEP rubrics are interpreted with maximum consistency. The matched-pairs slide below is evidence that, as a whole, the critical-thinking skills of our seniors improved over the course of SY 2012-2013. A matched-pairs T-test for the mean difference in pre-test and post-test scores confirms that this average improvement of 0.96 points was statistically significant at the 5% significance level (p-value = 0.0007). Original administration of this local assessment in SY 2011-2012 did not require students to write their names on the tests. The proper matched-pairs analysis for mean improvement was not possible. We learned from our mistakes. The localassessment report from SY 2011-2012 is available in our digital data base.

Number of Students

Change in score from pre-test to post-test

This Student Performance Data Document opened with a slide that was uninspiringuninspiring in the sense that the summary data did not indicate an area of potential focus that could serve as the foundation for a school goal. Across all subject areas and at all grade levels our nationalpercentile scores were all in the seventies (with the exception of a 68, 69, and 80). That same slide, however, can be viewed as inspiring. It is inspiring to know that we have such high-performing students. The last slides in this document demonstrate that we not only compare favorably to the nation as a whole; we also compare favorably to the schools in the new district that we have joined as a result of the realignment of DoDDS Europe. Our new district, the Kaiserslautern District, includes great schools with great reputations. Its inspiring to know that even among this distinguished company, Wiesbaden is above average.

Student Performance Kaiserslautern District vs. Wiesbaden HS

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Reading (District)

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Reading (Wiesbaden)

Student Performance Kaiserslautern District vs. Wiesbaden HS

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Math (District)

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Math (Wiesbaden)

Student performance Kaiserslautern District vs. Wiesbaden HS

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Language (District)

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Language (Wiesbaden)

Student performance Kaiserslautern District vs. Wiesbaden HS

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Science (District)

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Science (Wiesbaden)

Student performance Kaiserslautern District vs. Wiesbaden HS

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Social Studies (District)

3 Year Cohort TerraNova Social Studies (Wiesbaden)