Terry discusses the ways in which data
are used to identify students who need extra assistance,
the forms that assistance or intervention can take and the
effects of attendance on achievement.
The
benchmarks we set are the minimum expectations we have
for students' reading levels, and we've
got a process in place where we monitor progress at the
end of semester one and the end of semester two. We use
a variety of standardised tests and every teacher is involved.
We
then use that information to identify those students who
have made little or no significant improvement and target
them for intervention. We have layers of intervention.
First there are the adaptations that the teacher can make
at the classroom level. Education Assistants are attached
to classrooms which gives us opportunities for grouping
students as well. We use our tutors to target individuals
or very small groups for more intensive intervention. We
also use short-term intensive interventions like Reading
Recovery and at the moment we have three Reading Recovery-trained
teachers providing programs for Year 2 students.
We've
also correlated achievement with student attendance, so
that we can then have a look at the data in terms of how
a student is engaging with the school. There's actually
an equity issue here that is also considered because if
a child is consistently not attending, of course they won't
achieve to their potential. But we don't want to
only direct resources towards those children at the expense
of those who attend regularly but aren't making expected
progress.
There
are always exceptions to the rule but for the vast majority
of students — the better the attendance the better
the results. This year we correlated the Year 2 Diagnostic
Net results with attendance and we found that no student
who attended less than 70% of the time achieved all the
three components: reading, writing and number at expected
levels. They might have achieved one component but they
didn't achieve all three. At other levels the results
of correlating achievement with attendance are similar.
It's
an important message for the community and recently at
community meeting we put up a visual presentation to show
the implications over time. While some people think that
missing a day of school every week doesn't seem like
a lot, over ten years of schooling that equates to two
years of absence. Obviously more absence equates to greater
periods over the years. This has a significant impact on
a student's educational outcomes.
Some
people were surprised, and it was quite confronting for
a few as well. We also presented information about average
attendance across classes, which is what we report to District
Office. We also have more detailed analysis of attendance
data including cohorts of students and individual student
data as well.
We're
currently researching at the impacts on students who are
not attending school and the next layer in our research
is looking at engagement and why students do or don't
engage. This acknowledges that while you might attend school
you may not necessarily be engaged with learning programs.
So we're researching both the non-attenders and the
attenders and collected data, surveying parents, community
agencies, staff and students. We are gathering a significant
amount of information and it's community-based information
to inform decisions to improve the attendance and engagement
of students.
There's been a shift
of awareness in the community about the significance of attendance
and this information will feed back to the community as well,
through recommendations and action planning.
