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 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.

Subscribe to “Us & Them” on Apple PodcastsNPR One or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Share your opinions with us about these issues, and let us know what you’d like us to discuss in the future. Send a tweet to @usthempodcast or @wvpublic, or leave a comment on Facebook.com/usthempodcast.

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Math As a Culture War? Trey Kay Discusses the Latest Episode of 'Us & Them'

At a time when West Virginia’s GOP legislators are maneuvering to resend the state’s obligation to use Common Core Curricular Standards for reading and math,  Beth Vorhees speaks with Trey Kay, host of WVPB’s Us & Them podcast about his latest program about New Math.  

New Math was a method for teaching math introduced into public schools in the late 1950s and 1960s – a curricular answer to the Cold War fears of American intellectual inadequacy. In the age of Sputnik and increasingly sophisticated technological systems and machines, math class came to be viewed as a crucial component of the education of intelligent, virtuous citizens who would be able to compete on a global scale. New Math ultimately became a political football used in culture war battles over education.

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