Dear SGI Elementary Families,
During my first two years as Superintendent, I was surprised by the substantial amount of time that we were spending on benchmark assessments. These are given in the areas of reading and mathematics in the fall, winter and spring each year. Please understand, these assessments are critical for any school district because they provide valuable feedback to teachers, families, and students. They allow us to evaluate the progress that is being made and our need to intervene in learning and offer additional support when necessary. As a result, we set out last spring to revamp our assessment systems with two goals in mind: (1) Accuracy of the data received from these assessments and (2) Maximum amount of information about student learning in the most efficient amount of time.
I applaud our principals, reading specialists, math specialists, and instructional staff for rising to this challenge. We now have a reading assessment that can be administered to every student in approximately 5 minutes and a math assessment that takes about 25 minutes. The feedback from our first two rounds of benchmark assessments this year is that the data is accurate and truly demonstrative of where students are along the continuum of learning.
With that, it is now time to bring our families more fully into the conversation about student progress so that you know where your student is on their learning journey and what you can do to help support your child.
In the next few days, you will be receiving your child’s winter benchmark reports in their take home folder. The DIBELS report will highlight student progress in reading and the Acadience report will demonstrate their progress in mathematics. The reports will, of course, contain your child’s scores in various domains, but we have also designed these to contain additional helpful information for our families.
Assessment is not just about measuring progress. Much more importantly, the goal of assessment is to respond to the results we receive. These assessments give us great insight into our students’ strengths and areas for growth, but the work is in using this data to move students forward in their learning. Bottom line, we will be using these assessment results to inform and drive our daily instructional practices.
We are optimistic and excited about the work being done in our elementary schools both in terms of instruction and also how we are seeing progress through our periodic measurement of learning. If you have any questions after receiving your child’s benchmark reports, I encourage you to reach out to their teacher.
We look forward to continuing to improve our practices and we are grateful for the support of our school community.
James Bialasik
Superintendent of Schools