In past blog posts I’ve talked about the need for individual study plans in math for students below grade level. Recently, NPR released an article worth reading on the needs of students working above grade level. A new report shows that there are more of these students than most of us might expect.
“Makel and his co-authors found that, on the NWEA, 35 percent of beginning fifth-graders were already scoring at levels you might only expect by the end of the year. And, on the NAEP, the top 25 percent of fourth-graders outscored the bottom 25 percent of eighth-graders every year but one — for 26 years straight.”
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/09/12/491092575/getting-restless-at-the-head-of-the-class
Note: NWEA and NAEP are two of the most widely used assessments for elementary grades.
High achieving students have as much or more to gain from individual study plans as students in need of intervention. Case in point: City of Hammond Schools. They began using Ascend Math with their High Achieving (HA) students last year. Today, 88% of all their HA students are working at or above grade level (1-3 levels). At one elementary school our HA second grade students are working at grade level 3 and 4. At another elementary, all second grade HA students are working at level 3 and showed better than expected growth on NWEA testing.