Missouri's Park Hill School District (PHSD), with 15 schools and more than 10,000 students, has seen a 17 percent increase in enrollment over the past decade. Teachers used classroom assessments, but the district lacked the capability to track data on student progress toward state standards, and also lacked predictive assessment data.

Park Hill struggled to measure its performance in the Missouri Grade-Level Expectations (GLE) and needed to help bridge the gap between everyday classroom instruction and the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP).

From 2002 to 2005, approximately half of PHSD students in grades 3-8 passed the MAP grade-level assessments in communication arts and mathematics.

"We were tired of being surprised by MAP scores at the end of the year," said Jeff Klein, executive director of research, evaluation, and assessment for PHSD. "We would try to use MAP data to target instruction for incoming students in the fall but, during the year, teachers didn't have a sense of whether they were making a difference toward those end-of-year standards-based outcomes."

During the 2006-2007 school year, PHSD implemented the CTB/McGraw-Hill Acuity InFormative Assessment solution. Acuity helps classroom teachers diagnose students' strengths and instructional needs while predicting student success on state assessments. The solution integrates predictive and diagnostic assessments, reports, instructional resources, item banks, and item authoring, all of which are aligned to state standards and designed to improve student achievement.

"Park Hill adopted Acuity as a means of increasing agility in monitoring student progress toward GLE proficiency," said Klein. "Acuity was selected because it is aligned with our state test, the MAP, and because of its psychometric properties. The technical quality of the Predictive Assessments was a critical factor in our decision. We believe Acuity is the best benchmark predictor of the MAP that is available."

Predictive Assessments

In PHSD, all students in grades 3-8 take the Acuity Predictive Assessments in communication arts and mathematics three times a year. Students in grades 5 and 8 also take the Predictive Assessments in science. The assessments provide immediate information about student progress and growth, and allow educators to predict student performance on the MAP test. This information helps teachers prioritize their instructional action plans and concentrate efforts where students most need instructional intervention.

The Predictive Assessments also help teachers prepare students for the annual grade-level assessments using item content that mirrors the content on the MAP.

"Many commercially available tests are only loosely correlated with our state standards. Acuity aligns well and assesses the standards in a similar way to the type of items students experience on the MAP," said Klein.