Part+IV+2.

A variety of assessment tools enable St. Clement of Rome to provide a challenging, comprehensive, and relevant curriculum.
 * 2. Using Assessment Results **

Assessment tools are integrated into the lesson plans of teachers, which are reviewed weekly by the principal. These include oral or written pretests, textbook and teacher generated tests, short and long term written projects and reports, multimedia projects, group projects, student portfolios, and online testing. Scoring guides are provided for written responses and projects, with many teachers providing due dates for specific 'chunks' of work, thereby fostering organization with assessment. Children who need modified testing are accommodated per Archdiocesan standards. All assessment results are reviewed by both the resource staff and the principal. Any individual concerns or suggestions for a student or class' academic growth are discussed at CARE team meetings, at monthly level meetings, and with individual teachers. This allows administration and faculty to share a collective sense of responsibility for academic excellence. Faculty members are encouraged to confer with colleagues regarding the students' individual or collective needs both formally at level meetings and informally through daily conversation. Faculty often offer study groups and individual discussion with students prior to assessment to better meet their learning needs. Open and ongoing dialogue is crucial to both students' and teachers' growth.

2. Using Assessment Results St. Clement of Rome School administers the Iowa Tests of Basic Achievement, ITBS, in September each year. The ITBS is a group administered achievement test battery administered to all students in grades 3-8. It measures achievement in the core areas of reading, language and math, and indicates comprehensive achievement in science, social studies, maps, diagram, and reference skills. The Iowa Cognitive Abilities Tests, CogAT, are administered to all students in grades 4,6, and 8, and are designed to provide information about the child's abilitiy to work to his or her learning potential in the areas of verbal, nonverbal, and quantitative aptitudes. Combined, this battery of tests provides valuable information needed to meet the unique and individual learning needs for our students. (122)

Each student's individual results, with an item analysis of each question, is available to the administration and teachers. This provides the opportunity to observe trends in information mastered by the individual or group, as well as areas of growth opportunity. A year-to-year cumulative comparsion of ITBS subtest scores by grade level is analyzed annually to monitor academic growth. This provides a three-fold benefit for our school. It allows administration and teachers to easily view areas of strengths and weaknesses, allows us to compare our average grade scores with those of the Archdiocese of St. Louis average scores, and helps administration and teachers set future academic achievement goals.

The ITBS is a norm-referenced test and its interpretation of a student's results involves comparing a student's score with the scores of other students obtained on the same subtest given during the same time period. This allows administration and teachers to have a more global view of how our students are achieving, and is used in conjunction with ongoing classroom and textbook assessments in order to create a more diverse learning profile.(73)

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