Fast Help Yields Higher Scores (IL)

October 29, 2010

If you need academic help at Rolling Meadows High School, it doesn’t take long to get it.

Kids in this sparkling, high-tech high school have 90-minute "seminars" built into their block schedules every other day when they can seek help on their own — or be required to get it.

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That’s why at 9 a.m., 32-inch LCD screens scattered throughout the halls bear an unusual message in bright magenta letters: "Feel free to move about the building.”

For the next 90 minutes, waves of kids clutching pink or blue "passports” move through the halls. Their starting gate is their homeroom, where they write their seminar plans on their schedules and get pink "mover passes" approved for voluntary destinations or blue "priority passes” OKd for required ones.

"It’s convenient,” explains senior Mark Giarelli, 17, as he finishes up a history quiz in one seminar destination and prepares to work on college applications during his 90-minute seminar. "It gives you a lot of time to prioritize.”

In the last few years, the help kids got in seminars — and daily classes — has been more tightly focused on the skills they will need for college, says Rolling Meadows Principal Charles Johns. That’s because four y ears ago teachers realigned the curriculum to match up more closely with skills tested on the ACT, which makes up Day One of the state’s annual two-day achievement test for public school juniors.

Rolling Meadows’ growing ACT skill focus is a key reason last year’s juniors showed strong gains on the Prairie State Achievement Exam, Johns said. The school’s rise in the average junior reading and math score helped vault it over 124 others, landing it at No. 147 among the state’s public high schools, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis shows.

That jump came even though the school’s population has slowly grown more challenging, rising from 15 percent low-income in 2008 to 22 percent last school year.

In refocusing their curriculum, Rolling Meadows teachers pored over massive charts on ACT college-readiness skills and created up to three tests on those skills per subject and per semester — all tests that can be scored quickly by machine.

Teachers found some skills — such as reading a graph or identifying a main idea — were covered too quickly and needed more repetition; others were covered repeatedly and could be cut back.

"Through this really diligent work on curriculum and assessment, we saw over time that classes were getting stronger, and it all came to fruition with last year’s juniors,” Johns said.

In subject tests, teachers developed questions that probed different difficulty levels of the same skill. Kids who didn’t achieve 80 percent mastery were directed to help during seminars.

"By using a better set of data and more targeted classroom assessments, we were able to pinpoint where students were struggling within days of an assessment and we could turn kids ar ound to get additional help right away [in seminars],” Johns said.

Plus, English teachers weren’t the only ones teaching reading, the subject that showed the biggest Rolling Meadows test gains last year, even though statewide reading scores tumbled.

Health, science and social studies teachers also folded ACT-length non-fiction readings into their coursework to help kids master reading skills demanded in the ACT.

That’s why last week in Human Geography, students read a 1½-page article about "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema”(which kids eventually figured out is "American” spelled backward). In class they filled out a "graphic organizer” pinpointing three main ideas of the article and three supporting details about those ideas. They pulled answers from a list of options — just like they would on an ACT — and discussed their choices.

"We’ve moved away from checking comprehension based on a specific question, because then kids just read for the answer,” explained Human Geography teacher Charles Henry. "When kids put together graphic organizers, it forces them to make connections.”

Some teachers ask kids to highlight main ideas in blue and supporting details in yellow. Greek and Latin roots are covered in English class and science. Meanwhile, skills tested in Day Two of the Prairie State are evaluated periodically in standardized tests given in electives such as consumer education and wood shop.

When learning gaps surface, kids appreciate the chance to fill them in quickly via seminars, which can be semesterlong help in small groups, one-day mandated help or drop-in voluntary help.

During one seminar last week, seven kids seated at desks encircled math teacher Cindy Trent, five of them voluntarily going over an AP calculus test and two getting mandatory help with Algebra I. From her desk, Trent merely turned right or left to switch between groups.

Algebra student Arthur Salas, 14, said that with his priority pass he can’t waste time "fooling around in the hall.” Instead, he was seated at Trent’s side, winning praise for his progress.

"I need the help,” he said. "I wouldn’t be able to do this without her.”