STANDARDIZED TESTS

Standardized Tests



Standardized Tests

Problem Documentation:

Educators analyze academic achievement data and other student information for different reasons, but the main goal as educators is for all students to fulfill their academic potential. Since all students are different people with different learning styles, personalities, areas of strengths and weaknesses, the educational system must have programs in place to ensure that all of the varied students in the educational population are reached. Besides the students at the top of the academic scale, educators also need to focus, maybe even more so, on the students falling at the bottom of the academic scale.

When a student is not achieving academically, educators must consider many factors and ask themselves questions. Research demonstrates that one of the main contributions educators can make to ensure lower students are also achieving academic success is to increase the number of days spent in school (Fairchild & Boulay, 2002). The less time spent out of school the better; they will retain more knowledge from grade to grade because they are constantly immersed in the learning process in a safe environment, and this will hopefully help close the achievement gap between the highest and lowest learners. (Jacobson, 2008)

Other nations have traditional school year calendars that require students to attend anywhere between 180 and 220 school days. In a study analyzed by UNESCO (2003), 33 of 43 countries studied had a school calendar over 180 days. The traditional school calendar in the United States averages 180 days per year, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics (2001-2002). In order for schools in the United States to extend their days in student attendance, many districts are finding that summer school academic programs are one option. According to Cooper , when students are in school during a portion of the summer months, there is not as much of a learning loss as there would be if the students took off the whole three months. This study will examine different summer school programs, and specifically focus on student results at the middle school level in one particular district in the Midwest.

Causative Analysis:

The school district being studied made a change from a four-week summer school program to a six-week summer school program to see if student achievement would increase and if learning loss would decrease. (Jacob, 2001)This would also help districts obtain AYP goals. Before designing the six-week program, the district initiated a study committee to research various summer programs throughout the nation and decided to make changes to their four-week program based on these results. These changes included increasing the time spent in the summer school program by adding meal times and enrichment classes. This collaborative study investigated whether the new six-week summer school program increased SAT 10 scores in the areas of language arts, math, and complete battery as compared to those same measures after only four weeks of programming. The independent variable was a six-week summer school program introduced in 2008. The dependent variable was the test data from the 2007 ...