UFT Charter School Guides Instruction Using a K-3 Computer-adaptive Assessment

Brooklyn, NY | serving 891 students in K – Gr 10

SUMMARY

The UFT Charter School, Elementary Academy is part of a dual-campus primary and secondary school run by the United Federation of Teachers. The elementary academy serves kindergarten through grade 5. Educators use the Children’s Progress Academic Assessment (CPAA) in kindergarten through grade 3 to ensure that students are making adequate progress with respect to state standards and to share the most effective strategies for helping the youngest learners master specific foundational skills.

We love how easy the CPAA is to administer – we can just put the kids on the computers and let them get started. It’s also great that the reports are web-based, so you can access the information from anywhere.

Althea Headlam
Assessment Coordinator

CHALLENGE

Prior to using the CPAA, the UFT Charter School was using Fountas and Pinnell, DIBELS and Terra Nova to assess students in the early grades. Educators were open to evaluating new methods of assessment that would be developmentally appropriate for young students and would not add time-consuming administrative work for teachers, so the school decided to give the CPAA a try. Teachers were eager to use a state standards-aligned tool that could assess both literacy and mathematics quickly and provide them with information they could use to guide instruction both at the classroom level and for individual students with special needs.

SOLUTION

Implementing the computer-administered CPAA in the 2008-2009 school year helped the UFT Charter School to significantly cut down on teacher time needed for assessment. Since then, the school’s kindergarten through grade 3 classrooms have consistently used CPAA and Fountas & Pinnell data to inform and differentiate instruction.

Assessment Coordinator Althea Headlam manages all aspects of the program, from teacher training to data discussions. “It’s really easy to use, so we train new teachers but find that we don’t need refresher training each year for teachers who are already familiar with the program,” Headlam says.

Headlam and a staffer from Teacher Center (a professional development organization established by the United Federation of Teachers for staff development and mentoring) work together to support teachers in making the most of data from the CPAA and other assessments.
Educators at the UFT Charter School convene weekly for grade-level meetings. About once a month, these meetings focus on assessment data from the CPAA and other tools. Headlam mentions that the meetings create a space for teachers to share strategies and ensure that all students across the grade are being challenged at an appropriate level. “Each teacher shares strengths and weaknesses in his or her classroom based on CPAA data. We then evaluate whether those are different or the same across classrooms and use that information to choose the best strategies to work on a particular skill,” she says.

In an effort to continuously refine its use of data to differentiate instruction, the school just started a new initiative this year – a literacy enrichment and intervention period for grade 2, where each student is challenged in line with his or her diagnostic assessment performance. Headlam used CPAA reports and performance groupings to determine which children need to work on which skills.

Among children performing below grade level, some were assigned to a group to focus on phonics while others who have already mastered phonics concepts but need help in comprehension were assigned to their own group to ensure the most effective differentiated instruction for every child. For students performing at or above grade level, Headlam used CPAA data in tandem with Fountas and Pinnell reading levels to break up students into smaller groups. “It’s very helpful that in the CPAA reports, you can go in and click on a concept to sort students by performance in that particular category. The full student report is also a great feature,” Headlam mentions.

IMPACT

Capitalizing on Best Practices
Discussing CPAA data with the whole grade has provided teachers with a forum for sharing best practices in teaching specific concepts. It has also helped them identify whether a particular difficulty is shared by other students across the grade.

Targeted Enrichment and Intervention Time
Using CPAA data to understand concept-specific performance in great detail has helped make this year’s new initiative – a second grade literacy enrichment period – targeted and data-driven. If the period works well in the second grade, the school hopes to expand it to other grades in the future.

Enhanced Parent Collaboration
The school uses CPAA parent reports (which include performance summaries and suggested activities for the home) to get parents involved in their children’s education and reinforce the learning that goes on in the classroom by facilitating teachable moments in a family setting.