Retrograde motion

Today a few of my students appeared to have regressed rather than progressed.  Their results on the progress monitoring of Initial Sound Fluency (ISF) were worse than on the official September assessment.  At first I was frustrated and quite dismayed.  But upon further reflection I have decided that this assessment is not going to be an accurate reflection of what these students are learning in my classroom.  I need to look at the big picture.

For example, I have seen one of me ELL (English Language Learner) students try to sound out words on a page during writing.  He does a fairly decent job of hearing the consonant sounds.  During the (ISF) he struggles to find the picture that begins with a specific sound.  The most likely explanation for this is that his English vocabulary is not very extensive.  He is trying to remember the individual words and is not able to simultaneously separate the initial sound.

For my few students who struggle so much to learn letter names, I have begun to realize that they have made some pretty lucky guesses.  However, the assessment shows me that they do not understand the letter-sound connection.  It makes absolutely no sense to them yet.  The child who scored a 3 in September, scored a 0 today.  There is progress in that regression.  I believe he guessed correctly for those 3 right answers in September.  The students have a one in four chance of selecting the right answer, statistically his odds were good.  Today he remained silent during the test.  He didn't answer a single question until the very end.   Perhaps, he knew he didn't know and didn't want to guess?  On the very last answer he was able to give me the correct letter even though he was supposed to provide the sound.  Again, that shows some progress.  He knew that lollipop begins with l!

This year my job as a teacher requires me to dust off those long lost skills of data analysis.  Being a good data analyst requires figuring out the why behind the numbers.  Just like the planets that appear to be in retrograde motion, it's all a matter of perspective (well and some physics).  My students are moving forward in the same way that Mars follows an elliptical orbit around the sun even though the data points show otherwise.