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Lafourche Parish School Board

Situation

The Lafourche Parish School Board oversees 30 schools that teach more than 15,000 K–12 students in Thibodaux, Louisiana, located 60 miles west of New Orleans. The state’s “Reaching for Results” reform initiative includes a testing program to improve educational curricula and minimize “social promotion,” the practice of passing students to the next grade even if they do not have the skills needed to succeed.

Challenge

The Lafourche Parish School Board wants to ensure that their students receive a quality education and that limited budget dollars are maximized toward the effort. They want to measure progress by improving test scores, then use those test results to enhance learning for students in their region by

Solution

Using AnswerTree, the school board compares test scores of individual students against others in their school and in the entire school system. They also analyze the scores against demographic and other available data, then share the reports with educators so that lesson plans can be tailored to address specific areas of need.

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Results

Both teachers and administrators are all too familiar with the universal problem of balancing the need for resources against the constraints of shrinking school budgets. Everyone has the best interests of the students in mind, but there are many different ideas about how to address this problem. The Lafourche Parish School Board looked to AnswerTree for a cost-effective way to bring harmony to their debates about prioritizing the needs of students while taking into consideration the tight K–12 school budget.

We want to make decisions based on an analytical appraisal of data. PASW Statistics and AnswerTree put us in a position to get information that we never had before.

Chris Bowman
Technology Manager
Lafourche Parish School Board

Identified strategic variables to start improving test scores

Each year, fourth and eighth graders in Lafourche Parish take the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) test to help educators gauge student achievement in various subjects. Teachers also use LEAP results to modify their curricula to address areas where students are falling short. For example, if a school has a number of students who score low in the English section, a principal might ask her teachers to spend more time on that subject in the classroom.

But when technology manager Chris Bowman started running LEAP test results through AnswerTree, he found interesting, previously undiscovered, relationships among scores in various sections of the test. For example, he discovered that low scores in the reading comprehension and conventions parts of the exam were an indicator of poor overall test performance for fourth graders at a particular elementary school—a relationship that did not exist among other fourth graders in the school system. Because of this revelation, teachers at the school developed lesson plans designed to strengthen those specific reading skills, which in turn should improve the students’ overall scores.

With the advanced analysis techniques in AnswerTree, Bowman dissected the data in new ways. He said, “We want to make decisions based on an analytical appraisal of data. PASW Statistics and AnswerTree put us in a position to get information that we never had before.”

Delivered actionable results quickly

The LEAP tests are given each spring and the Lafourche school board typically has only a few weeks to analyze and digest the data before they plan summer school programs. Looking to speed the process, Bowman ran his first analysis in AnswerTree in just minutes: “Truly, in no time flat, it’s done! AnswerTree can quickly point out which factors influenced the target variables so that we can be as productive as possible in a short time.”

To be most effective, Bowman wanted to identify which discrete parts of the test the students had mastered, then focus on the part they had not mastered. Using a Wizard to set up his data file, Bowman quickly imported the information into AnswerTree and began applying a series of rules. For example, if a student missed 10 questions out of a possible 20, then he had a 79 percent chance of getting an unsatisfactory overall score. Bowman started seeing other patterns emerge from these rules and results right away. Then, he instantly exported bitmap version of key results he developed based on the values and placed them in a report to the superintendent.

Initiated a dialogue between the school board, principals, and teachers

Bowman wanted to foster discussion among the Lafourche Parish faculty and administrators. In the past, decisions about education and test scores might be made solely on anecdotal evidence or perceptions from the basic results of  annual test scores. They needed to focus their research so that the answers would be most in tune with actual student needs.

With the modeling power of AnswerTree, Bowman highlighted the pertinent issues so that everyone—from the school board to the principals to the teachers—could interact with the results. Bowman says, “AnswerTree gives us a way to take our ever-shrinking dollars and put them where they will do a lot of good. For the first time, principals and teachers had a distinct set of rules to apply toward student achievement.”

Bowman benefits from AnswerTree’s easy-to-use interface and robust statistical processing. “I would never have been able to do such sophisticated analysis without AnswerTree.”