In the school year 2015–2016, I worked with students with special needs in a second grade resource setting. While I was in a resource setting, several of my students were extremely high needs, such as non-verbal and medically fragile. As a class, my students were performing well below grade level (two or more years below on average) in all academic areas. To qualify this, I had students that came into my classroom without knowing their letter names or sounds. Taking into consideration where my students were beginning, I knew that we would need to make dramatic academic gains and planned accordingly.

 

Living in a school district with a high rate of transiency, I had students joining and leaving my classroom throughout the year. For the purposes of this data collection, I will be including data of the students who were in my classroom for 50% or more of the academic school year.

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Three core forms of evidence for dramatic academic growth are presented here: two qualitative and one quantitative.

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Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills

(DIBELS) is a state-mandated assessment that all of my

students were required to take. From this assessment,

my students demonstrated an average of 1.6 years of

growth in their reading abilities as measured by

accuracy and word count.

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IEP goals were measured via teacher-made assessments,

daily work, records, and observations. The data for the

class demonstrated an average of over 80% mastery for

both academic and behavior goals. To further support

this, I have included data from weekly spelling

assessments where students demonstrated mastery with

80% or higher accuracy.

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Writing was measured via daily work, records, and

observations. Many of my students had IEP goals that

were related to their writing as well. To measure their

growth, I reviewed their work to look for appropriate

capitalization, spacing, ending punctuation, and spelling.

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