Juniors Come Through On ITED's

We received the results of our annual battery of tests associated with the Iowa Tests of Educational Development and are very pleased with the performance of our junior class. While we had improvement at the other grade levels, the juniors take on special significance because this is the grade level that we have to report out to the Department of Education and is thus the one that is used to measure our success in accordance with guidelines established with No Child Left Behind. The very good news is that 87.6% of our juniors scored at or above the proficient level in reading comprehension. That score does put us above the state trajectory and is a significant improvement over our scores from last year.

In math, the level of proficiency was also good -- 77.5% -- but not as high as we would like to see in relation to the trend line. It was just a little bit higher last year, but when one looks at performance over the past eight years, the level has been relatively constant. It is an area that we need to see continued growth in to meet the trajectory goals for the state and one where we need to dig into the data to gained a better understanding of everything from instruction to student performance.

The junior's performance in science was also very strong and exceeded the trajectory level established by the DE. At NFHS, 88.8% of the juniors were proficient. And, it was in this content area that we had the largest pecentage of "high performance" students and the lowest percentage of "low performing" students. All of this points to solid understanding of the concepts included on the ITED in this content area as well as close alignment of the concepts and skills that are taught.

We put an incentive in place this year that challenged students to put forth their best effort. Many of them showed solid improvement as 58% of all of our students 9-12 met at least one of three improvement/performance criteria. If they did not have a strong sense of purpose on these tests in the past, this incentive worked for at least a few of them. In the end, our goal is that all of our students show progress each year on these tests. They are the measure used by our Department of Education to demonstrate how well our school is doing. The problem over the years has been that students see no directed benefit for them. We all know that intrinsic motivation is much stronger than external, but until the "system" has something else in place, we use what we can to emphasize to students that these tests are important. In the last few years, NFHS has also started to put these scores on transcripts and they are required on applications for Dollars for Scholars.

Once we sort through all of the results, we will have reports ready for conferences in the spring and we will also report out on other things that we discover about our student's performance. However, this first snapshot is very good news for our school and does lend some support to let us know that we are on the right track.