Students in Sweetwater County School District No. 2 continue to do better on Wyoming’s standardized tests than the average Wyoming student, according to the latest batch of data released Tuesday by the Wyoming Department of Education.
Under the state testing system, WY-TOPP, students are tested in English, science and math. In each of the three subjects, their test scores are labeled as either “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” or “advanced.”
Grades 3-10 are tested in English and math, while only fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders are tested in science.
Among almost every grade level and in almost every subject, students in SCSD No. 2 scored “proficient” or “advanced” at rates above the statewide average during the 2021-22 school year. Only eighth-graders’ test scores in science and English were below the state average.
Compared to previous years, Green River high schoolers made significant gains on the science test last year.
While 46.5% of 10th-graders in Wyoming were either “proficient” or “advanced” in science during the 2021-22 school year, 66.9% of Green River 10th-graders — including those at Expedition Academy — scored either “proficient” or “advanced” on the science test. In the previous year, exactly 50% of Green River 10th-graders had scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the science test.
In the last two years, teachers at Green River High School have been working on science curriculum with officials from the University of Wyoming, which might account for the dramatic improvement in test scores, Superintendent Craig Barringer said.
“(Our teachers) have had ongoing professional development that has led to some great things with our science,” he told the Star.
The biggest drop in the district’s test scores in 2021-22 came among that year’s cohort of third-graders. In 2020-21, 75.6% of third-graders in SCSD No. 2 scored either “proficient” or “advanced” on the math test. Last year, however, the number of third-graders scoring “proficient” or “advanced” on the math test dropped 22.1 percentage points — down to 53.5%. On the English test, 51.6% of third-graders tested “proficient” or “advanced” on the English test, down from 62.8% the previous year. Still, the district’s third-graders performed better than the state average.
Barringer credited the COVID-19 pandemic with the major drop in proficiency among third-graders last year. He believes those students were disproportionately impacted by virtual classes because, at the time the pandemic hit, they were at such a fundamental point in their educational process: the period in which they were learning to read.
“They were first-graders when the pandemic hit and they didn’t go to school for the last 9-10 weeks of the school year,” he said. “Missing school really showed up (on the test scores). You will never be able to replace the teacher in the classroom and I think the pandemic has shown that.”
Overall, SCSD No. 2’s test scores in 2021-22 improved from the year before in about half of its grade levels, which Barringer said is impressive considering the number of absences due to quarantine.
“The fact that we went up anywhere last year is a surprise,” he said. “It was a harder year than the year before. The fact that our test scores have improved the last two years is a credit to the teachers.”
Since the WY-TOPP system was introduced in the 2017-2018 school year, SCSD No. 2’s math scores gradually improved until last year. In the 2020-21 school year, the average of all grades in SCSD No. 2 was 62.3% “proficient” or “advanced” on the math test. That average dropped to 58.9% last year, when the statewide average was 48.6% either “advanced” or “proficient.”
English scores in SCSD No. 2 have stayed fairly flat since the 2018-2019 school year, and dropped about 1 percentage point last year, down to 60.4% “proficient” or “advanced.” The statewide average for the English test was 53.1% “proficient” or “advanced.”
As is the case across the state, students’ proficiency against the statewide benchmarks tends to drop as they near high school — particularly on the math test. Barringer said elementary students tend to be more motivated to perform well on standardized tests than high-schoolers, and the drop in test scores doesn’t necessarily mean that students are falling behind in later grades.
“There’s a lot more to school than success on WY-TOPP tests,” he said.
Statewide, WY-TOPP scores continue to slightly lag behind where they were before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“Although there are areas where results decreased slightly for a second year, overall they were less than three percent compared to the state results prior to the pandemic,” State Superintendent of Public Instruction Brian Schroeder said in a Tuesday press release. “Wyoming’s commitment to keeping students in the classroom continues to be reflected in these assessments results.”
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