District: Science ‘Impacted Dramatically’ by COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on science, district officials say.

Many students missed out on lab experiences in 2020 as sixth-graders, as the pandemic set in here, when they went out for four months of remote learning for two units of study, Deputy Superintendent Dr. Jill Correnty told members of the Board of Education during their regular meeting, held Oct. 17 at New Canaan High School.

Those units, in ecosystems and earth science, “are really critical,” Correnty said during a presentation on K-8 assessments. 

“They were in a hybrid environment and then, as you recall, we had half-day Wednesdays,” she said. “So we had to make some decisions with our science curriculum, and you may have recalled me talking about that last year and some of the changes that we made were in the climate unit, and the changes that we made were because we know that they were going to receive this information again as ninth-graders. So we had to make a decision from a curriculum perspective, and we knew they were impacted on two units of study in sixth grade. We try our best to close those gaps but in science, when you shift over to sixth grade it’s also a shift in the standards.”

New Canaan Public Schools does not “teach to the tests,” Correnty said, referring to assessments, so two years later when the district saw the class’s science scores in eighth grade, “they weren’t surprising to us.”

Meets or Exceeds Achievement

	2019	2021	2022
Grade 5	88%	88%	84.9%
Grade 8	84%	81%	75.2%

Source: New Canaan Public Schools

 

Correnty said the “ultimate purpose of assessment is to support and enhance student learning.” Though assessments are used to drive instruction, “we are very cautious when we look at our annual state testing,” she said. 

“It is not meant to be a sole measure of our student achievement,” Correnty said.

“And I think it’s always important to remember that we never ‘teach to the test.’ We are using our curriculum. We have standards within our curriculum. We have assessments that determine whether we are meeting those standards. And we have a wide range of assessments, from district assessments to writing portfolios to observations to universal screenings. A wide variety.”

Assessment tests typically are administered after April break and last for about five days, Correnty said. She reviewed state assessments, such as the Smarter Balanced Assessment, Next Generation Science Standards (or “NGSS”) and SAT,  detailing each type of assessment, reviewing how they’re structured and scored, what it tests for, how results are reported and how the district tracks whether students are growing.

Referring to the NGSS, Correnty said, “So we took a dip in eighth grade, and certainly when you dive deeply into that data in eighth grade, the targets that we did not perform well in were the climate, the ecosystems and the space,” Correnty said. “So we know they will be picking that up as ninth-graders when we move into the geophysical.”

She added, “This is just an example of how we don’t ‘teach to a test,’ that we have to make curriculum decisions. You make curriculum decisions based upon that vertical alignment of what we know is best for kids, and those were decisions that we made not trying to cram everything in but to try to develop the concepts in depth that we had time to do so.”

Even so, New Canaan’s fifth-graders did very well within the District Reference Group or DRG “and continue to have strong performance,” Correnty said, while eighth-graders finished third in the DRG:

Next Generation Science Standards

	Grade 5	Grade 8
Wilton	70.7%	82.9%
Weston	83.4%	78.7%
New Canaan	84.9%	75.2%
Darien	83.6%	73.3%
Westport	78.3%	72.4%
Ridgefield	81.8%	67.5%
Redding	75.5%	*
Easton	72.7%	*

Source: New Canaan Public Schools
*Data suppressed to ensure confidentiality

 

The district also saw strong performances from students in the English Language Arts portion of the Smarter Balanced Assessment (third- through eighth-graders), with 84.1% meeting or exceeding their achievement level—a figure that is more in line with recent pre-pandemic years.

English Language Arts DRG Comparison, Meets or Exceeds Achievement Level

District	Overall Results Level 3 or 4
New Canaan	84.1%
Darien	80.8%
Weston	79.2%
Westport	78.9%
Ridgefield	78.7%
Wilton	78.2%
Easton	77.1%
Redding	73.8%

Source: New Canaan Public Schools

 

Board of Education members asked Correnty whether there’s more the BOE could do in terms of staffing to address COVID-related challenges (additional reading and math specialists likely would be most useful though they’re very hard to find), how many math specialists NCPS has per school (one FTE at each elementary school and two math specialists at Saxe), whether those math specialists are pulling out students who need more help or those who need special attention to be challenged (the former, as well as coaching teachers), how elementary school teachers handle the multiple levels of students in class (teachers know, in part based on assessments, exactly what each child needs to move a level up), whether the Smarter Balanced Assessments mimic the SATs (the SAT is aligned to the Common Core and there are some similarities, though the SAT is purely multiple choice not open-ended), whether the district pushes to see students tested in Smarter Balanced beyond their grade level (not for that test, as per state requirements, though in the Northwest Evaluation Association Assessment the students can), how teachers are managing the COVID-related knowledge gaps of students they’re getting (in different ways, and teachers can differentiate instruction based on standards not only for their own grade level but those that came before and that follow), whether fifth- and ninth-grade teachers find their incoming students prepared (yes) and whether the district tracks growth targets over time (yes, that is planned).

Board of Ed member Erica Schwedel asked whether, with respect to the hands-on lab work that some students didn’t get because of remote learning, whether they will get that experience later or will be taught later to pick up on what was lost.

Correnty said, “The lab work that they’re doing is always related to their curriculum, but I have to say last year with our fifth-graders in particular, we were spending a lot of time teaching them about the procedures of a lab, because in fourth grade they had all individual materials. They were doing it individually, they weren’t working with partners, they weren’t collaborating, they weren’t having those conversations because that’s just what fourth grade looked like for them. So when they came into fifth grade, a lot of those skills that they may have learned, we had to re-teach.”