Math Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

FAFSA Issues, College Going Rate And More Presented To LOCEA

A change to a federal financial aid form for college students is having major ripple effects through West Virginia’s higher education system.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) unlocks both federal and state financial aid for students but a recent attempt to simplify the form has caused delays for college applicants across the country.

“At this point this year, we have six million students who have filled out a FAFSA,” said Sarah Tucker, chancellor of the Higher Education Policy Commission. “At this point last year, we had 17 million, this is across the country. So we have a significant deficit right now that we’re trying to make up and trying to figure out exactly what’s going on and how best to help our students.”

Tucker told an interim meeting of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Education Accountability Sunday the Student Aid Index (SAI), which determines student need, is now being determined by a new interface between the IRS and the federal Department of Education that is not working correctly. Further delays occur because users of the new system are not notified of errors until after the form has been submitted.

Tucker told the commission the faulty SAI formula is causing delays for the state’s educational programs as well.

“I need to know how much money the federal government is going to be giving to all of our students in order to know what our award is going to be for West Virginia Invests,” she said.
“We’re really sort of stuck in limbo until this functionality gets fixed.”

The Higher Education Grant Program, West Virginia Invests and PROMISE Scholarships are all currently delayed.

Nationally, West Virginia is faring slightly better than average with the new FAFSA. As of last month, more than 6,000 seniors across the state have filled out the form, a number Tucker credits to hundreds of FAFSA workshops the HEPC and other organizations have hosted.

“We’re actually ranking 20th in the number of high school seniors who have completed the FAFSA,” she said. “The West Virginia Department of Education has done a lot of work as have all of our institutions in trying to do FAFSA workshops to make sure that our students know how to fill out those forms.”

Tucker said West Virginia Invest and PROMISE may revert to awarding the same amounts as last year without adjustments to ensure students are not further delayed.

“I think that may be where we end up because I don’t want to keep stringing students along,” she said. “I want to do the best we can to make sure that they know that they can go to college. Our college going rate is finally ticking up. We have this great momentum.”

College Going Rate

The oversight commission also heard a report on the state’s college going rate from Zornitsa Georgieva, director of research and analysis for HEPC. She highlighted a one percent increase in post-secondary enrollment from 2022 to 2023, including enrollment in trade programs or other career and technical pathways.

“For the class of 2023, the college going grade is 47.4 percent,” Georgieva said. “We’ve had more than 7,900 high school graduates continue into some kind of post-secondary education this year. I think that really speaks for the hard work of high school staff, high school counselors, teachers, our staff in our secondary system, as well as post-secondary institutions and staff that works around outreach. And providing information about financial aid.”

In 2021 the national immediate college enrollment rate was 62 percent, which puts West Virginia 15 percent below the national average. “Immediate college enrollment” is the metric used by the National Center for Educational Statistics and looks at students who enrolled in a post-secondary institution the fall after graduation.

Georgieva said when looking at the 12 months after graduation, including spring enrollments, West Virginia’s college going rate jumps to 49 percent. Rates differ from county to county, and 36 of 55 of West Virginia’s counties increased their college going rate year over year.

Benchmarks and Screeners

As part of House Bill 3035 – also known as the Third Grade Success Act – that passed last year, screeners or benchmark assessments must be administered at the beginning of the school year and repeated mid-year and at the end of the school year to determine student progression in reading and mathematics kindergarten through third grade.

Sonya White, state deputy superintendent, presented the results of the mid-year screeners to the commission.

“Overall, we were encouraged by the results, we had a decrease in the number of students… who needed that intensive intervention,” she said.

Even accounting for regular academic gains in the first half of the school year, White said the need for intensive intervention decreased from the start of the year to mid-year. She said the screeners are also identifying new students that need intensive interventions and are getting the help they need.

“On the front side are the literacy results,” White said. “We had an average decrease of 5.4 percent of students that needed intervention in grades K through three, and an average of 6 percent of the students in grades four through eight were scoring in the lowest category.”

White presented even higher decreases in intensive intervention for mathematics, “with an average of 6 percent for K through three and an average of 8.1 percent for four through eight.”

Del. Joe Ellington, R-Mercer, expressed concern at some of the numbers that showed an increase in the need for math intervention between first and second grade.

“Do we have schools looking at why there might be that big change from only 17 percent initially in first grade up to almost 40 percent when they get the second?” he said.

White cautioned that the state is still in its first year of collecting the data but theorized that those numbers could be a result of lowered learning opportunities three years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We are being proactive,” she said. “We are also looking at getting more detailed data for each section so we know what pieces of mathematics are struggling with.”

Policy 7212

Earlier in the meeting, legislators heard a brief description of changes to Department of Education Policy 7212. The policy applies to the transfer of students, both inside and out of their county of residence.

Student transfers became a point of contention this past fall after legislation passed during the 2023 regular session changed eligibility rules for student athletes after transfer. Gov. Jim Justice and others urged the legislature to revisit the issue during this year’s legislative session, but no action was taken by the legislature.

The proposed changes to Policy 7212 include significant clarifications of the requirement for county boards of education to implement an open enrollment policy for nonresident students, including a new allowance for boards to revoke applicants for chronic absenteeism or behavioral infractions. There is no mention of athletics in the proposed changes.

The changes to 7212, as well as other policies, are open to public comment until May 13.

Teachers Learning State’s New Literacy And Numeracy Programs

The West Virginia Department of Education is hosting hundreds of educators during the second INVEST Conference of the summer.

Teachers are meeting in Morgantown this week to learn more about the state’s new programs for reading and math.

The West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) is hosting hundreds of educators during the second INVEST Conference of the summer.

Superintendent Michele Blatt said this is the second statewide conference to help prepare educators to implement the Third Grade Success Act. Teachers from the south of the state met in Charleston last month.

“It is to begin the implementation of House Bill 3035, the Third Grade Success Act, to start training our teachers and principals on the implementation of the science of reading components,” Blatt said. “And also start with the Unite with Numeracy work around the math skills so that our students can be successful by the time they leave third grade.”

Todd Seymour, principal of Preston High School and a former math teacher said, “This week is all about trying to enhance our reading and math, teaching and learning in the state.”

Seymour said educators are trying to reiterate the foundational courses and skills that impact every educational outcome.

“Not that social studies, or science, or foreign language isn’t important,” he said. “But reading and math are incorporated in all of those. It’s the foundational courses, our reading and math. If you can’t read the social studies textbook, you’re not going to do well. If you’re in science and can’t do the calculations, you’re not going to do well.I think that’s really what we’re trying to do, and trying to come up with research based strategies that are going to help and enhance what we’ve been doing,” he said.

For many educators, INVEST is their first look at the state’s Ready Read Write literacy program as well as the Math4Life: Unite With Numeracy program.

Trenna Robinson, a fifth grade teacher in Elkins, said she’s excited to learn about the Unite With Numeracy program, but that Randolph County has been proactive in improving its math base.

“Schools were allowed to have their own math team and we meet after school, and we actually had our own math getaway, which was really cool,” Robinson said. “Teachers brought different ideas. It’s all new up and coming things to help make our students successful.”

She said with the setbacks of COVID-19, teachers as well as students and parents need to refocus and get back to where they need to be, and both small, local teams as well as statewide conferences, contribute to that.

“I like our small teams, because we can focus on our students and our needs within our buildings and our county,” Robinson said. “I also think this is really beneficial because we see large groups of people, and see different ideas from different places and get their ideas and see what we can use to help our students be successful.”

Latest National Assessment Shows Lowest Math, Reading Scores In 50 Years

The National Assessment of Educational Progress released its long-term trend assessment Wednesday, showing the largest declines in the more than 50 years the test has been administered.

The latest national assessment of students shows the continued negative effects of the pandemic on academic achievement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress released its long-term trend assessment Wednesday, showing the largest declines in the more than 50 years the test has been administered.

The math and reading assessment of the country’s 13-year-olds echoed recent declines in similar assessments of math, reading, history and civics at the 4th and 8th grade levels after the pandemic.

The long-term trend assessment is the last in the series of what the National Center for Education Statistics is calling pre- and post-pandemic assessments.

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the long-term trend assessment seeks to maintain a relatively stable assessment to compare across years.

“These findings show consecutive declines for long-term trend math and reading,” she said. “However, it is fair to say that the pandemic may have accelerated some of these declines in that these are the largest math declines we’ve ever seen in this data collection.”

Carr said reading scores dropped to levels not seen since the first assessment in 1971.

“While the previous declines were driven by lower performers, these new data show everyone is declining: lower, middle and higher performing students,” she said. “In fact, the lower performing students with our math assessment are dropping at a faster rate than their higher performing counterparts. In reading, the drop has been uniform across the distribution, but the 10th percentile students are now performing lower than their counterparts in 1971.”

The long-term trend assessment also asked students to respond to a survey questionnaire.

Responses showed the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun has risen over the past decade; about 31 percent of 13-year-olds said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun in 2023, while 22 percent said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun in 2012.

In math, fewer students are taking algebra. While about 34 percent of 13-year-olds in 2012 said they were currently taking algebra, that figure has declined to 24 percent in 2023.

Unlike the reading and math scores reported last fall, which relied on a sample size of more than 200,000 students, the long-term trend assessment results are based on a nationally representative sample of approximately 8,700 students in each subject that does not allow for detailed, state-by-state analysis. This is a similar sample size to the U.S. history and civics assessment results released in May.

State Scores Low On National Report Card

West Virginia’s math and reading scores are some of the lowest in the nation, but data released by the U.S. Department of Education Monday shows academic decline across the country.

West Virginia’s scores fell across the board on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the first nationwide measurement of learning since the pandemic.

The assessment, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, continually assesses what students in the United States know, particularly reading and math in the 4th and 8th grades.

In reading, the state’s average 4th grade score was 11 points below the national average, while the 8th grade average was 10 points below. These were the third and second lowest reading score averages in the nation, respectively.

In mathematics, West Virginia’s 4th grade scores were 9 points below the national average, while 8th grade scores were 13 points below, the country’s sixth and fourth lowest averages, respectively.

In all four assessments, West Virginia was at least six points below its own average on the 2019 NAEP.

Ebony Walton, a statistician and analyst with the National Center for Education Statistics, said one of the biggest factors for student outcomes during the pandemic was access to resources.

“What we saw was, particularly for lower performing students, they had a hard time accessing materials online, they had a hard time having a computer available to them at all times, they even had some difficulty having access to a teacher every day compared to their higher performing peers,” she said.

Walton stressed that declines in educational outcomes are not unique to West Virginia and will require a broad response.

“There’s so much that’s happening underneath that average that’s worth investigating,” she said. “I want to encourage everyone to keep moving forward so hopefully your communities can build and not just get to where they were before the pandemic but move beyond that.”

W.Va. Students Show Slight Improvements in Math and Reading Scores

West Virginia fourth-grade students showed slight improvements in math and reading scores on the latest Nation’s Report Card but remain below the national average.

Results released Tuesday on the National Assessment of Educational Progress show fourth-graders in the state scored 236 out of 500 in math, compared to the national average of 240.

The average reading score among West Virginia fourth-graders was 217, compared to 222 nationally.

In eighth grade, the average math score of 273 in West Virginia was up 2 points from 2015 but below the national average of 283.

The average eighth-grade reading score fell slightly to 259, compared to the national average of 267.

Us & Them: Remembering New Math & Common Core

When conservatives and liberals fight about school curriculum, the disagreements aren’t just about science and history. Even math has been a battleground in the culture wars.

On this week’s episode of the “Us & Them” podcast: how America approaches the teaching of mathematics. From the New Math and No Child Left Behind to Common Core, how we teach addition, subtraction, multiplication and division can literally cause division.

From West Virginia Public Broadcasting and PRX, this is “Us & Them,” the podcast where we tell the stories about America’s cultural divides.

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