Welcome back to school! We hope that you are excited about seeing your students and looking forward to a year full of the joy of learning.
Here at OEP, we are excited to be starting the school year with an updated website! https://oep.uark.edu.
We have been digging into the data from last spring’s ACT Aspire and wanted to share three takeaways with you.
1. Students scored better in 2022 than in 2021, but are still well behind pre-pandemic achievement levels.
The figure below presents ACT Aspire proficiency rates in math, English Language Arts, and science. The first four columns for each subject represent pre-pandemic achievement (2015-16 through 2018-19). ACT Aspire was not administered in 2019-20 due to COVID-related school closures, so the last two columns represent student achievement in 2020-21 and 2021-22.
(no results from 2020 due to COVID)
Math achievement rates, represented in blue, showed the greatest decline from 48% proficient in 2018-19 to 36% meeting expectations in 2020-21. Proficiency rates increased by 2.2 points in 2022 to 39% of students meeting grade-level expectations. At the current growth rate, it will take over 4 years to return to pre-COVID achievement in mathematics.
English Language Arts achievement rates, represented in green, declined from 45% proficient in 2018-19 to 37% meeting expectations in 2020-21. Proficiency rates increased by 3 points in 2022 to 40% of students meeting grade-level expectations. At the current growth rate, it will take 1.5 years to return to pre-COVID achievement in ELA.
Science achievement rates, represented in orange, declined from 40% proficient in 2018-19 to 34% meeting expectations in 2020-21. Science proficiency rates increased to 36% of students meeting grade-level expectations in 2022. At the current growth rate, it will take over 3 years to return to pre-COVID achievement in science.
2. Improvement in 2022 achievement is not strongly correlated with school poverty rates.
While we all know that achievement on state assessments is strongly correlated to the rate of students enrolled in a school that are eligible for Free/Reduced Lunch (a proxy for lower SES), we find that the improvement in achievement from 2020-21 to 2021-22 is not.
The figures below reflect the relationship between a school’s percentage point change in math and ELA, respectively, from 2020-21 to 2021-22, and the percentage of FRL-eligible students enrolled in the school. The greater density of schools above the red line indicating no change in achievement reflect the prior finding that the majority schools saw increased proficiency rates. Schools are above and below the red line at all rates of low-income enrollment.
The lack of a strong relationship between academic improvement and % FRL-eligible students demonstrates that there is significant variation in learning that is not related to the income level of students. All kids can learn and grow!
3. Improvement in 2022 was relatively consistent across student demographic/programmatic groups, but gaps in achievement persist.
The table below presents the percentage point difference between African-American and Caucasian students’ ACT Aspire proficiency rates in math, English Language Arts, and science since 2017-18. Across all subjects and years, there is about a 30 percentage point difference between Caucasian and African-American proficiency rates. This gap is twice the magnitude of the proficiency rates for African American students in Arkansas.
This example highlights the persistent differences in performance evidenced by student populations in Arkansas schools. Focusing on accelerating learning for students in our classrooms that are not meeting grade-level expectations continues to be critical.
| 2017-18 | 2018-19 | 2020-21 | 2021-22 | |
| Math | -29 | -29 | -27 | -29 |
| ELA | -33 | -30 | -30 | –32 |
| Science | -30 | -32 | -30 | -30 |
If you are interested in digging into these results for your school- you can find the dataset including preliminary school-level results from last spring’s ACT Aspire here. We have included the preliminary proficiency rates for students overall, as well as for the racial and programmatic populations.
The dataset also includes a tab comparing preliminary 2022 proficiency rates are compared to 2021 rates.
OEP awards will be coming in late October. Be sure to subscribe to the new site so you can stay up to date with all that we have in store!
