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DeWitt reports year-over-year gains on NWEA benchmarks for K'8 reading and math
Summary
Director of curriculum Ryan Decker told the board that DeWitt's spring NWEA results show improvement with about 81% of students at or above national average in reading and year-over-year gains in math despite a testing-norm anomaly noted by NWEA.
Ryan Decker, director of curriculum, presented the district's spring NWEA benchmark results for grades K-8 and said the district surpassed its internal goal of 80 percent of students scoring in the national categories of average, high average or high in reading.
Decker said about 2,000 students were tested and that roughly 81 percent met or exceeded the district's target in reading, which he described as an improvement of around 120 students compared with earlier years. He attributed gains to sustained data-review processes, teacher and specialist intervention, and adoption of a new core curriculum.
On math, Decker noted that NWEA identified an algorithm change last year that produced a higher-than-expected spring score in some administrations; NWEA is expected to publish corrected norms over the summer. Even allowing for that anomaly, Decker said year-over-year gains are visible in the district math results and that some buildings, such as Herbison Woods, showed particularly strong median-percentile performance in math.
Decker told the board that the state no longer requires detailed benchmark reporting the way it did early in the pandemic, but the district continues to set internal stretch goals and to administer NWEA three times per year (fall, winter, spring) to guide instruction and intervention.
Decker said he has building-level data available and that comparisons to peer districts require direct coordination with NWEA or other districts because some cross-district comparison tools are no longer publicly available. The presentation concluded with the offer to provide detailed building and grade-level tables to board members and the public.
