I recently had a conversation with Mark Patterson, AP at Olympian High School who described his school’s analysis and decisions related to CAASPP testing. After the 2015 testing, Olympian High noted that the listening and speaking claims were the lowest area in the assessed English Language Arts standards (a theme that was repeated in every SUHSD school). From that analysis they determined to work on the listening and speaking standards as a focus for the 2015-16 school year. Now that the 2016 results are available, Olympian is taking that analysis a step further to seek to understand the root causes of the areas of greatest deficiency on the 2016 CAASPP data. This progressive approach to data analysis is a good example of the work that we should all be doing to first describe the patterns and trends we see in the data, then think carefully and deeply about the causes for the results that we observe. This is difficult work and is aided by the strategic use of protocols.
Initial data analysis should start with a protocol that guides you through the data from description, to linking practice with outcomes, to generating possible solutions based on the analysis at hand. The Root Cause Analysis that Olympian High will be undertaking this year can be supported by this protocol and even deeper thinking around this can be seen here. I can’t encourage enough the widepsread use of protocols, in particular at the Professional Learning Community (PLC) level where Common Formative Assessments for a particular course can be tools to unearth data patterns and trends that can lead to more informed decisions by individual teachers, PLCs, site and district teams. You can see more information about protocols on this page of our R&E website.
Cheers