by Cynthia Howell
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Monday, August 22, 2005
The terms "curriculum mapping" and "Project SOAR" won't show up on a vocabulary test, but the words are destined to become common parlance among teachers, students and parents as the Little Rock School District and the local Public Education Foundation work this year to pinpoint and fill in gaps in student learning.
More than 120 Little Rock teachers devoted part of their summer to developing the curriculum maps. The maps, or guides, lay out the literacy and math skills that teachers must teach each month at each grade in the 25,000-student district. The skills are pulled from the state's academic standards.
Twenty-seven of the district's nearly 50 schools will use Project SOAR, which stands for Student On-Line Achievement Reports, as the process for determining whether the students are actually learning those skills in preparation for state Benchmark Exams to be given in early 2006.
The main components of the student online ahievement reporting system - a $525,000 initiative of the Public Education Foundation of Little Rock - include:
- A set of five exams to be given in third-through-eighth grades during the course of the school year.
- A return within 72 hours of the test results to the teachers.
- Four foundation staff members to help teachers analyze the test results and identify the skills they need to reteach.
- Online access for students and their parents to each student's SOAR tests and the questions that were answered correctly and incorrectly.
- A means for comparing student growth in achievement from the beginning of a school year to the end of the school year.
Lisa Black, executive director of the education foundation, said the organization has worked in its three-year history to understand how the district operates and to help the community realize the difficulty of educating children. The online achievement reports project, which was piloted last year in four middle schools, moves that work to the next level.
"Our goal with SOAR has been to build a knowledge base in Little Rock that understands what students should know and be able to do," Black said. "We want the community to understand what students need to know, and we want to do what we can to provide support and tools to the Little Rock School District to better serve students."
Students in the participating schools will take two comprehensive tests in math, language arts and science; one at the beginning of the school year and another at year's end. An additional three "formative assessments" will be given in October, January and March to measure whether students have learned the objectives as specified in the curriculum maps for the months preceding each of the three tests.
The multiple-choice test questions come from a bank of more than 130,000 questions developed by The Princeton Review, a national test preparation company.
Little Rock teachers over the summer selected questions from that bank that relate directly to the Arkansas curriculum standards and the curriculum maps.
The two comprehensive or global exams, the first of which will be given Aug. 29 to Sept. 2, are particularly significant, Linda Remele, the foundation's Project SOAR director, said last week.
"We are assessing students right away to get a feeling of where this class stands today and not where they were last May," Remele said. "Then we are doing a parallel assessment in May so that you will be able to see where the achievement has grown, not only by individual student but also by classroom. This will be one of the first times that we've ever had a true growth model for every school that is participating."
The results from the test to be given later this month will be available to teachers and students after Labor Day. Over the past two weeks, about 700 English, math, science and special education teachers in the participating schools were trained on how to use the online technology and test score data.
The test results, practice quizzes and links to lessons will be available to teachers, each student and their parents on The Princeton Review's Homeroom.Com Web site, which will be accessible by a student identification number. Schools will provide more specific information to parents about accessing the site over the next few weeks and at the school open houses in mid-September.
Olivine Roberts, associate superintendent of educational services in the Little Rock district, said district principals who elected to participate in the project were attracted by the connections the system makes between curriculum, instruction and assessment, as well as by the immediate data that teachers can use to guide their instruction. Just as important, Roberts added, is the fact that the process will cause teachers to talk about strategies to correct student deficiencies.
"If you look at the traditions of teaching, you close the door and the teacher has his or her 40 students and they do what they know to do and the dialogue is not there," she said. "This provides the discourse and that is powerful."
Remele, an educator for 32 years and most recently director of elementary education in the neighboring Pulaski County Special School District, was hired in December to direct the project.
Over the summer, three additional educators were hired: Dee Schulten, a high school English teacher of 31 years; Linda George, a 29-year educator who most recently was principal of Sherwood Elementary; and Barbara Means, a 25-year eductor most recently an assistant principal at Southwest Middle School. The four will spend about 16 hours a month in each of the 27 schools to assist teachers with the online chievement reporting system.
Donors for the achievement reporting include the Trinity Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, Entergy Foundation, Riggs Benevolent Fund and Acxiom.
"It's hard for us to thank them enough," said Vicki Saviers, the education foundation's director of development. "Our work is made possible through the generosity of people who want to see the Little Rock School District be successful for all children."
The schools that are participating in the SOAR project are Bale, Brady, Carver, Chicot, Dodd, Forest Park, Franklin, Fulbright, Geyer Springs, King, Mabelvale, Meadowcliff, Pulaski Heights, Rightsell, Romine, Stephens, Terry, Wakefield and Wilson. All eight of the district's middle schools are participating, four of which are entering their second year in the program: Dunbar, Southwest, Pulaski Heights and Mabelvale. The four middle schools new to the program are Cloverdale, Forest Heights, Henderson and Mann Magnet.
Colleen Ferguson, a seventh grade English teacher at Southwest, said the system is userfriendly and beneficial as it enables teachers to identify student needs and then create practice questions for the students. The students can do the exercises online at school or at home with a parent.
"We've needed something like this," Ferguson said. "I can see that it will cause our test scores to soar."
