Benchmark Presentation

1. Benchmark Presentation By: Alyssa Zwiercan

2. District’s assessment data management practice • District 225 • currently using School Logic for entering and analyzing its data. • tool is used to generate reports utilizing information and data such as students’ grades, ethnicities, age, and their grade in schooling.

3. Explanation of data collected • The data they collect is typically from various tests such as: • Terra Nova • The PSAE • The ACT • The Plan Test • Access (for ELLs) • The Explore Test

4. Data’s use • The data is often used in aiding faculty, teachers, and department chairs • They may use this information to make adjustments to their teaching style, forms of assessment used, or for decisions to make department wide changes • The data and analysis is often reported in school and district meetings, professional development seminars, and school workshops • The data is often presented through the use of excel charts and graphs

5. Tool created to support assessment data management • This practice tool is intended to support teachers who have both native English speaking students as well as non-native English speakers in their classroom. • ELLs face a number of challenges in keeping up with their native language peers in mastering high school subjects. Their difficulties are more pronounced in high school English classes that require them to write essays clearly and competently. • There is a pressing need to provide educators with strategies to increase the writing competence of ELLs and reduce the amount of errors in their English writing. • This study focuses on the most common errors found in essays written by high school students who are English language learners (ELLs) compared to those of native English writers.

6. Its construction and use of advanced application features • The tool I have created is to make it simple for teachers to tally up a number of 3 main categories of writing errors when evaluating a writing assignment. • This excel tool adjusts the mean and standard deviation of those errors and breaks these results into clear categories of which students are ELL or not. This allows the teacher to see if high errors in one area are common amongst all students or one specific group of the students. • The tool was constructed through the use of Microsoft Excel. • In the third column the teacher states what ethnicity the student is. The fourth column’s input will automatically be generated based on what the teacher inserts in the third column do to the implementation of a “If..Then” statement. • If a cell contains the answer “yes,” it will automatically be highlighted and outlined in red so the teacher can easily locate which students are ELLs • The final three columns breaks down writing errors into three main categories, spelling, punctuation, and grammar. • The results are broken down for the entire class, ELLs only, and native English speaking students only.

7. How the tool works with sample data • What my excel tool does is break down a diverse class of students according to two groups of students which is ELLs and native English speaking students. • Once the teacher enters in the ethnicity of the student the next column will automatically fill in if the student is ELL or not based upon an if then formula implemented in the tool. • The teacher will then insert in the number of errors tallied from the particular writing assignment being evaluated. • For example, the first student Dylan, is currently listed as Caucasian. If I change this cell to indicate that the student is Hispanic, the conditional statement entered then becomes false, turning the following rows to acknowledge that the student is now considered an ELL. The color changes accordingly.

8. How the tool works with sample data • I have 3 tables that are formulated to produce a ttest result of the two groups of students. By using an IF statement formula, the data from the spelling column will be inserted into this first table based on whether it falls under an ELL student or not. • If the student has been listed as native English speaker, than there error results will be placed into the Group 1 category for the ttest of that particular writing error. If the student is deemed ELL than their tally of errors will be automatically inserted into the Group 2 category • On the bottom the average and standard deviation is calculated for each writing error for the class as a whole, ELLs only, and native English speakers only

9. How the tool is intended to be used to support and improve instruction • I have worked with students who come from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds with a majority of them of Hispanic descent • Numerous grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors can have a negative effect on a teacher’s ability to comprehend the student’s ideas and can impact the teacher’s assessment of the student’s ability to think clearly and write competently. • With numerous types of errors occurring, a teacher may have to use the limited class time to address the most common errors found in the essays. • One must consider that the writing errors of native and non-native speakers of English could be different to the extent that the lesson fails to meet the learning needs of the ELLs in the room. • This tool would be useful to implement in a classroom because it would make it easy to break down and compare error results found between the native English speaking students and the non-native English speaking students.

10. User review of the tool’s value • Simple and clear • Tool automatically highlights results in different colors • Quick and easy to see difference in results for comparisons because of highlighted rows • Possible change: • Tool to be formatted to include the addition of more columns for my types of writing errors