The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s kindergarten through third grade students improved their literacy scores last school year. That’s according to literacy assessment data presented to school board members during a work session last week.
The data covers the first school year in which the district’s new literacy curriculum was used for elementary school students. That program emphasizes decoding skills and language comprehension and is a product of the Alaska Reads Act. The landmark legislation has a goal of ensuring students are reading at grade level by the end of third grade and mandates regular assessment of student progress.
Cindy McKibben is the district’s intervention and assessment coordinator and presented last school year’s data to board members.
“It's nice to see you all again,” she told the board. “Thank you for letting me Zoom in. So what I have here today is an overview of how our district did at the district level, per grade, last year in our mClass data.”
The district satisfies the legislation’s early literacy screening requirement with a product called mClass. The testing service comes from the same parent company, Amplify, of the district’s new literacy curriculum, Core Knowledge Language Arts, or CKLA.
Last school year, the district’s kindergarten through fifth grade students took three mClass literacy screeners. McKibben says those screeners are short – usually about one minute long – and test students’ foundational reading skills. The data she presented reflect students’ composite scores.
The results don’t reflect student achievement.
“They’re risk categories,” she said. “What that means is that the student is placed into a performance category that tells us the likelihood of that student meeting their end of the year goal for that grade without any additional help.”
As a whole, the district’s kindergarten through fifth grade students boosted their literacy performance last school year.
At the beginning of the year, more than a third of those students, 35%, were well below benchmark. By the end of the school year, that rate dropped to one in four students. Overall, the proportion of students at or above benchmark increased after each of the three assessments, while the proportion below or well below benchmark decreased.
McKibben says district kindergarteners saw the most dramatic growth that school year. She points to charts showing the proportion of kindergarteners well below benchmark.
“You can see the major shift that was made from 57% of our kindergartners down to just 21% by the end of the year,” she said. “And again, we see those benchmark and above benchmark students growing as well. You see that same trend in first grade.”
The district’s internal growth isn’t the only positive metric.
McKibben also showed a chart that compares the district’s end-of-year performance categories to those of the state and nation as a whole. Across all grade levels, KPBSD students performed better in more than half of the metrics. Less district students were below benchmark at the end of the year and more students were at or above benchmark.
Board members were satisfied with the results. Here’s school board President Zen Kelly.
“I think that the improvement that we see through all grades, but especially the K-2 element of this is fantastic,” he said.
He asked McKibben if there’s a relationship between the district’s new literacy curriculum and the positive scores.
“I think that we can see a direct correlation here in grades K-1,” she said.
McKibben’s full presentation is available on the district’s website.
