Capstone Project Week 2

Capstone Project Week 2

In the field of education, specifically testing, assessments are a keyway of measuring a student’s performance levels and ability to comprehend the subjects and topics that are taught in the classrooms. To this end, access to assessment data, such as the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) program can be useful to analysis particular areas where students are not performing well, or underperforming, and correspondingly, how teachers can also react by tapering their teaching methodologies and pedagogies.

Foremost, it must be stated that the STAAR Performance Standards provide a useful quantifiable tool to understand the different mastery that students have in each level: it labels performance categories through the following labels: Masters Grade level, Meets Grade Level, Approaches Grade Level and Did not Meet Grade Level, each with decreasing level of mastery of a certain topic, concept, or class (Texas Education Agency, 2021).

In this assignment, using the data from one district and county as an example, I will discuss how Mathematics at Grade levels 3-7 could be improved. Generally, while it is promising that many students approach about 85% and above level of mastery at the “At Approaches Grade Level or Above” standard in both years, for all 5 grades from Grade 3 to Grade 7, there is also trend among Grade 3 Mathematics to Grade 7 Mathematics, that the percentage of students that acquire mastery often falls below the 50% mark, meaning that less than half the students achieve the highest mastery level (Texas Education Agency, 2019).

The rate of the highest mastery level (‘At Masters Grade Level’ standard) decreases as the grades increase: the mastery level for Grade 3 Mathematics is 39%, 40% in 2018 and 2019, and this steadily decreases to a 21% and 11% mastery respectively, for Grade 7 Mathematics (Texas Education Agency, 2019).  Looking at the State Board of Education (SBOE) Texas Essential Knowledge Skills (TEKS) Review Committee’s recommendations, we can understand some of the key modalities of education in the mathematics syllabus which the SBOE seeks to inculcate and foster. Indeed, the SBOE indicates that a focus should be on teaching numerical literacy, by teaching students how to develop number and operations through fundamental concepts, to know names of numbers and to count sequences (TEKS, 2011). Students are also expected to use numbers in a meaningful way to create strategies to solve problems and react to practical situations involving arithmetic (TEKS, 2011). Finally, students should also be able to learn how to use mathematical processes, apply them to problems in everyday life, to use problem solving models to find, justify and evaluate solutions, and to be able to communicate, organize, record, analyses these mathematical concepts (TEKS, 2011). These apply both in Algebraic Reasoning, Geometry and Measurement, and Data Analysis (TEKS, 2011). Naturally, the difficulty and expectations on students increases from Grade 3 to Grade 7, with the increased use of unknowns in algebraic expressions.

This can also be reflected in the Rationale documents in the STAAR Math Rationales for each grade. Perhaps, moving forward with the areas of improvement, it is suggested that given that mathematics is a subject whereby foundational knowledge are important, it may be advisable to begin strengthening fundamental concepts taught in the elementary levels, such as from Grade 3, in order to ensure students have a proper foundation to build upon when they are dealing with more complicated concepts, or dealing with issues with more complex modalities in the middle school years (Haycock & Cockburn, 2008). It is therefore a better idea to focus more on teaching fundamental concepts and ensure higher levels of mastery at Grade 3 (or earlier) levels, in the form of these subjects – Algebraic Reasoning, Geometry and Measurement, and Data Analysis – to have a higher performance at higher