The end of our first grade year is suddenly and surprisingly almost in sight! And with the end of the school year comes several important assessments at Wellman Elementary which help us to gauge the growth of our learners over the course of the year. Two of these assessments which are administered building wide are the STAR math test and the aReading test. You may remember hearing a bit about these assessments at your child's conferences earlier in the year, but here's a bit more information to help you understand what both of these tests look like in first grade.
STAR Math: Over the next two weeks, all first graders at Wellman Elementary will visit the computer lab to take the Star Math computer adaptive test. This is the second year Wellman Elementary has utilized this as a school wide screening tool in the area of math for all students. This will be the third time your child has taken this test over the course of the school year. This assessment touches on a variety of math skills and concepts and adjusts the difficulty of the questions to the test taker throughout the test. At the end of the test, each child is given a scaled score, this information allows the teacher to determine growth based of the students' previous score(s) as well as when compared against a national norm.
aReading: The aReading test is similar to the STAR math test in some regards. It is also taken on the computer, the difficulty of the questions increases or decreases dependent upon students' testing responses, it is also given three times a year, and it covers a broad range of literacy skills. We are in our first year of implementation for this assessment at Wellman Elementary. When students complete this test, also receive a score which will show their own growth over the course of the year, and will also be compared to a benchmark score that has been set by the state.
Hopefully this information gives you some insight into some of the testing in schools you may be hearing about on the news. We are confident that each of our first graders has grown in tremendous ways this school year and are excited to share their test scores as one measure of their growth with their end of the year report cards. They have worked tremendously hard this year to make the awesome strides they have gained and even though it's nearly May....we still have a lot of that important work yet to do!! Thank you as always, for your continued support from the home front! Your child would not be the gem they are without you:)
