More development days are needed to improve test scores
Staff writer
Marion High School principal Brenda Odgers said the school needs more staff development days if they are to improve ACT and state assessment test scores.
Odgers gave a presentation to USD 408 board members Oct. 11 in response to the board’s criticism of ACT scores Sept. 13. While the board accepted the need to make math and reading review classes mandatory, they did not make a decision on allowing more staff development days.
USD 408 schools currently have five staff development days. In August, there were bullying conferences and a conference that showed blood-born pathogen and sexual harassment videos. In September, staff analyzed curriculum to improve test scores. Nov. 8 is scheduled for team building and Jan. 17 is for TEEN inservice. March 4 is the last staff development day; it is used to develop teaching techniques.
Odgers said about 60 percent of the time slotted for staff development days is actually used to improve teaching techniques, curriculum, and teacher teamwork, collaboration that could improve the learning ability of students.
“If you’re asking teachers to do something new, you need to give teachers time to sit down and learn,” Odgers said.
MHS counselor Phoebe Janzen reiterated Odgers’ point that teachers do not have enough time during the course of a school day to discuss techniques and strategy.
“Some teachers get here at 7 a.m. and some are busy until 5 p.m.,” she said. “They have 50 minutes of personal time a day.”
MHS math teacher Gary Stuchlik teaches voluntary ACT preparation classes when test times approach. To start putting more ACT preparation into the normal curriculum, he agreed that more staff development days were necessary.
“It’s difficult in normal school to plan past normal school,” he said.
Odgers presented information on other schools at the board meeting. Clifton-Clyde had the most development days of any school she researched with 11. Schools comparable in size to Marion — Hesston, Herington, Council Grove, and Canton Galva — all had eight days.
However, Odgers would prefer a situation more like Lyons. Lyons only has three staff development days per year but they have a late-start Friday every month — time they use for teacher development.
“You get the most effective use of your time in an hour or two,” she said.
Odgers said she contacted administrators at all of the schools she researched. She said all of the schools’ test scores improved with the addition of more staff development days, according to administrators.
For ACT preparation, Odgers and Stuchlik agreed some steps that could be made to improve scores would be to practice ACT questions during classes and give occasional timed tests.
“The ACT is the only test that has a time limit,” Odgers said. “It’s not an IQ test. It tests what you have learned from high school. It’s an evaluation of how well you’ve learned over your school career.”
Stuchlik said one of the strategies he suggests for the ACT is to fill in every question, but, especially on the math portion of the test, to start with the questions students know how to solve and gradually work up to the harder questions. He said the math test is mostly made up of curriculum learned in ninth grade or earlier, but the questions are not organized from the easiest problems to the hardest.
He and Janzen encourage students to take the test as sophomores so they can take it as many as three times. Janzen said most students take the test twice. Although the test costs money for every attempt, Janzen said there is a program that allows students with free or reduced-price lunches to take the test for free.
Although the number of students Stuchlik will have in a class increases as the test date approaches, he said he has about two to seven students in his ACT preparation classes.
The importance of the ACT grows as more students are college bound, which is why Odgers is pushing to include more ACT-related items into the curriculum.
“It’s meant to sort kids out,” Stuchlik said of the test.