N.J.-S.P. Taking Steps to Improve ISTEP Scores

Posted on October 21, 2016
Author Michael Gallenberger, WKVI

The North Judson-San Pierre School Corporation is once again bracing for low test scores. The results from the spring 2016 ISTEP haven’t yet been released publicly, but Superintendent Annette Zupin is already reassuring members of the public that steps are being taken to improve them. “Instead of waiting for the test scores, we’re anticipating that they will be low, just like all the other schools are expecting and anticipating,” she said during Tuesday’s school board meeting. “We need to do some planning right now.” Zupin said schools around the state again have to deal with a new test and changing cut scores, making it difficult to compare results year-over-year.

Math has been a particularly challenging area for N.J.-S.P. School board member Derrick Stalbaum says the state’s current method for math assessment makes it difficult to determine exactly what skills students are lacking. “It’s almost the way that we’ve been taught for the last, probably, 100 years is completely different now,” he said. “They will never ask you to take nine times six, even through a story problem. They will make you solve a problem and then translate it from meters to feet and then translate it to inches. I mean, it’s things like that. It’s several steps. We can’t look at something and say, ‘Oh, the problem is multiplication,’ because most of the time, the problem is, ‘I don’t understand what this question is asking me to do because it has 15 steps.'”

Zupin said the corporation has been adding time for math help outside of regular classes, but so far, that doesn’t seem to be working. Now, she’s calling for both the elementary and the junior/senior high school to change their schedules to allow for bigger blocks of time to be spent on math.

Additionally, Zupin says the junior/senior high school plans to simulate more closely actual testing conditions when students practice. “Thoughts before were, ‘We don’t want to stress the kids out and put any more pressure on the kids than we have to,’ so we tried to keep things low-key,” she said. “Well, we’re not succeeding with the math, so maybe we’ll try this route. I still hate the idea that kids feel pressure. So at some point, we need to make sure the kids understand a balance, and we do need to remind them that there are other measures of success. But we can’t ignore the test scores and what they mean to the schools.”

However, Zupin said part of the problem is that students are simply bogged down with tests. “Those poor 10th-graders. Look how many assessments they took last year,” she said. “They took their local assessments SRI/SMI, they took PSATs, they took the ECA, and then they took the ISTEP+. And the ECA is the one that mattered to the students the most because that was for graduation purposes.”

The corporation plans to continue its professional development efforts, to help teachers relay information to students more effectively. Zupin says all of these efforts will be detailed in each school’s state-mandated improvement plan. Those will be completed by December 1.

However, 2017 will be the last year for the ISTEP. What will replace it remains to be seen.