ABSTRACT
At the time the following Friday Focus was sent out, the date of our all-important Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests was just over one month away. These are tests administered in the state of Georgia in grades 1 to 8 that determine whether or not a school makes Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the NCLB initiative. The year before, our school had “made” AYP, but just barely, as we struggled to meet expectations across all student subgroups. This year, too, we knew that our results would place us just over or just below AYP minimum standards in certain categories. The previous week’s Friday Focus set the stage for the theme of standardized testing by discussing how we can write better test questions ourselves; this week’s topic directly related to improving student performance on standardized tests.
