Social Studies Unit Process- Data Analysis Process Chuck Green - American History Department We started by dividing the social studies curriculum into several units e.g. Establishing English Colonies, Life in Colonies, Road to Revolution, Revolution, Confederation to Constitution, American Government, Key Themes 1789-1850, Road to Civil War, Civil War, and Reconstruction. For each of these units we have established essential questions/guiding questions. These serve as my broad higher-level understandings that I wish students to demonstrate proficiency with long after the specific facts of the unit are forgotten. We then break down the guiding questions into learning targets that define specifically what student’s need to master in order to demonstrate an understanding of each guiding question. For each guiding question and learning target set, we have created instructional lessons that are principally student centered, collaborative, and project based. This “chunking” of content enables me to periodically formatively assess student achievement using conferencing, cps, exit slips etc. as appropriate before moving further into the unit content. The class and individual results determine whether we re-teach content by taking a different approach, or provide individual students with conferencing or alternative activities i.e. information organizer, alternative reading, tutoring etc. with each designed to improve their understanding of the content. This process improves the chances that all students that choose to will be successful on this part of the summative assessment. Repeating this process throughout the unit for each guiding question and learning target set ensures a greater likelihood that most students, if they so choose, will be successful on the summative assessment. The summative assessment results that we have provided demonstrate this fact. For example, the 8th grade Life in the Colonies/Early Colonies results show that all classes averaged approximately 87% on the assessment. Of the 151 students tested, including IEP students, 95 + students scored above proficient. Only 8 students scored below proficient. We believe this success is due to the formative assessment process, the student -centered, high interest, project based instructional approaches taken with each unit of study and reflecting on our instruction made possible by our TBT collaborations. Also note that the test results provided do not reflect scores students have obtained by the contracting for reassessment opportunities that we provide. All students have the opportunity to meet with us and establish together areas of weakness, and set up an action plan to remediate as needed. Reassessment takes either written or oral form depending on the individual student. In many cases, students that wish to improve a proficient or above proficient score on the summative assessment can design an “Achievement Extension” activity that targets key content and when completed demonstrates that the student has achieved an even higher level of understanding. (With proficient and above proficient scores it is difficult to isolate on any significant student achievement weakness) Also note that each of summative assessments is common and organized by guiding question and associated learning targets. The common summative assessments serve us in two ways, assuring that all students are getting the necessary content and allowing for comparative conclusions in terms of test item reliability and best instructional practices. The summative assessments organized by guiding question and learning targets enable us to determine with individual students what specific parts of the unit gave them trouble and focusing our remediation on those weaknesses. (All tests are 25-30 multiple choice with 1 or 2 extended responses, 1 or 2 of the guiding questions) It is during our TBT meetings that results are analyzed and we can reflect on what instructional practices were successful, and which test items had to be improved for the following year. This year we have looked back at each of last years TBT meeting notes for the units covered to make sure the instructional or test item change suggestions we made the previous year have been corrected for this year.