Tempe's Gililland Middle School Seeing Improvement in Student Test Scores through Graphing Results

TEMPE - Jan. 12, 2009 – Taking liberties with an old cliché, a picture - or in this case a graph, can be worth a thousand words.

At least that’s been the case at Tempe’s Gililland Middle School, where students are the midst of their second year graphing their math and reading goals and test results. On a campus where nearly 50-percent of the students speak Spanish as their primary language, the graphs helped to drive home an important point – academic improvement and performing well on tests really matters.

One of the challenges that Gililland's teachers faced until recently was that students didn't know what their test scores meant. As a result, they weren't engaged in the testing process. “They just knew they had to take the tests,” sixth grade math teacher Laura Mendralla noted.

Last year, the campus’s 884 students, three-quarters of which are eligible for the federal free and reduced lunch program – an indicator of poverty – graphed their math and reading goals and test results throughout the year.

The process transformed a hard-to-grasp concept – academic improvement – into a visual tool creating excitement throughout Gililland’s classrooms as students repeatedly saw their progress.

Here’s how the process has been implemented: three times during the school year, Gililland students take the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) reading and math tests in the school's computer lab. Before taking each test, students determine the score they want to achieve. The assessment is given on a computer, which immediately provides their test score.

Students then plot their goal and their actual score on a graph and determine the score they want to achieve on the next test.

Rick Horvath, who has been Gililland's principal since July 2006, said, "If the student is progressing, you'll see a bar or line graph with the scores going up in a stair-step form. It is a very helpful tool in communicating to parents, especially Spanish-language and urban parents, how their child is doing. A picture is worth a thousand words."

"What's really beneficial," Principal Horvath added, "is that students grasp their scores and are motivated to do better, especially if they want to take elective classes such as art or computers, instead of math or reading intervention classes."

Mendralla, who has taught for five years at Gililland Middle School, agreed. "When they have to set test goals and graph their results, they take it more seriously. The difference is remarkable."

When Mendralla compared her 124 students' spring 2008 math scores with those at the beginning of the 2007-2008 school year, she found:

• 91% increased
• 6% decreased
• 3% stayed the same

Even more remarkable was how much the scores increased. She said the average annual growth for a student is five to seven points. At Gililland, 57 percent of the students who increased their test scores improved by 11 to 20+ points. Another 19 percent of the students improved increased their scores between 6 and 10 points (average to above-average growth).

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