And when we presented our data, we talked about um the slide which I know you have all seen, but I'll just remind you there's um a a graph of all students and their their K3 progress. I'm sorry, their progress on the grade three smarter balance assessment and then our high need students and then our black and Hispanic students. And years ago, we started that gap was quite large. And you can see through through the years how we have have begun to close that gap and how close that gap is now. It's it's really um it's a powerful visual and this call that we were on this presentation that we did was on a Zoom call and so it was quite nice when we put that visual up to see heart emojis and um thumbs up emojis and smiley face emojis from the from the folks on the on the call.
In this particular experiment, students were able to answer the question, what is soil erosion and why is soil erosion an important factors for farmers to think about? And they had seven different experiments that they ran. Um I think three were with plants, four was without plants. They all had different types of soil in them. Um, and they ran water through it and they had to collect that water and measure that water um, and take observations of that water to determine which bottle bottles were creating what kind of erosion. And do farmers have to think about that? Is choosing the proper soil important for a farmer to consider before planting his crops? So in addition to looking at class data analysis, we also had students using models to help explain their thinking. This is another experiment we ran where students added sand, clay, and lom to a cup with water and really shook it up and they let it settle and it surprised everyone that it doesn't stay like this mud pie milkshake.
Thank you. One of the things that I mean I just want to say too is we look at Galileo year-over-year data. Not um I like to compare by standard and the standards are constant sixth grade to sixth grade standards, right? Um, and what you will see on our year-over-year data on our Galileo is we're reducing the amount of minimally proficient kids substantially. So, why you don't see these tremendous growth in a proficiency or highly proficient, you're seeing these red bars just drain down and go to the new Oh, I wish that was what I was seeing. Yeah, I wish that's what I was seeing because I want to believe that. No, it's not our Galileo year data. Um, so sixth grade ELA, we did a comparison year-over-year. Sixth graders last year, sixth graders this year. You're seeing in Galileo 3 last year was taken in February.
So I I did feel like we got some nice compliments for that. Um, and there were also some superintendent on the call who um made made comments such as if my data looked that way, I wouldn't have bought a program either. So, I felt like it was um a good opportunity for us to be very honest about what our our progress has been and what we've done as a result. The highlight of that was that we truly believe and you can go into our classrooms and see the fidelity to which our teachers are implementing the science of reading in K3. We showed them some videos and some clips and really Pat Castle, the Rams, um Kevin Hanlin, the way that this has rolled out has been truly exceptional and we feel very confident in the the reading instruction that our students are getting. We did share, as you all know, that we've had such an increase in multilingual learners over the years, that where we struggle, as does everyone in Connecticut, is meeting those needs with the with meeting those needs as those numbers grow.
It makes these beautiful little layers and all of them do. and the students really have to think about, wow, I've really mixed this, but I'm seeing the layers. Where did that come from? So, through the use of uh discussion and modeling, they're able to try to figure that out. Uh making thinking visible. This learning strategy allows students to learn about the characteristics of sustainable and unsustainable farming practice. this particular lesson. Um, they made T-charts with the pros and cons and hung them up for everyone to learn about a particular practice. They were given different articles and kind of split in half as to, you know, maybe eight students had sustainable, eight students had unsustainable. They learned about the article. They learned about the practice. They wrote it on the chart paper. They hung it up for everybody to see. And then that particular group got to explain to the whole class about the practice they learned about.
Our Galileo 2 this year was taken in February. We went from 59.3% of our kids being minimally proficient, reduced it to 47.9 sixth grade ELA. You see it? You're going to look at the second row and the fourth row. Yeah, I see that. Um, if you look at six math, they went from 65.4 minimally proficient students at this time last year to this time this year, 51.3. Let's see if that goes to so fifth grade math this time last year and this was supposed to be the strong cohort, right? But they went from 59.4 last year of minimally proficient kids to now at this time this year second benchmark went from 59 to 45. 50 LA went from 57 to 51. I get it. My question is for you because I I would ask Caroline, but you're you're standing in front of me. Um, if you're moving Go back to the math one, please.
And we said that to we shared with that board that um we would be interested in in some support with that and how we could help with that. And that was an area of of struggle for us relative to to everyone else. and asked, you know, that they look into what could advise us on some areas that could help. So, that was our um that concludes our report. I just um for a minute, I just wanted to add one thing on the um school climate survey. Um it's intended, the survey is intended for students in grades 3 through 12. It's researchbased. Um there are some minor differences between the previous survey that we have used and the one that came out from the um state department this year. So the comm committee did discuss that at length um at the meeting tonight.
At the end of that particular lesson, they then had to take a stance as to whether they would like an unsustainable or a sustainable practice for a farmer to use in their community. Some of the practices we used were using uh pictures as like meaning phenomenons and having students talk about what they notice and wonder to promote engagement. And for many students, the idea of making a claim based on their observations was new to them. So, sentence starters were also given so they could uh get into that habit of how do I make a claim? How do I give evidence and how can I explain it with scientific reasoning? Word walls are a great tool in science classes and can be beneficial for students learning and understanding. Uh students can discover scientific words together. Um word walls help students comprehension and supports visual learning and that's why we have the pictures beside there.
Can you go back to math one? There you either one of them. Okay. If you're moving from 65 from last year to 51 from this year, is that what I'm that's what you're saying, right? And the those kids have to be going somewhere. All right. If they're not minimally proficient anymore, they have to be going somewhere. Look at the green band of proficiency from six. Well, that's that's the reason benchmark 3 went from 8.3 to 19.2. Now, go back to your reading one. So, Melinda, leave it here for a second, Julie. So, you're absolutely right. Uh Melinda, you're looking at, you know, first of all, that 15 14% drop. Some of those kids moved into the yellow. That 24% that 22% are not the same kids as were the 24 over on the, you know, last year. So, some of those kids have moved into the I get this because I that's why I wanted to go back to this.
Our intention is to give you this information to be able to read through it, digest, do your own research, come up with any questions you may have for the future because in the future meeting um we will be distributing the actual um Google form or a likeness of it so that you will be able to see exactly what we're asking you to vote on. So that's just some more background information. Mr. white. Thank you. With regard to the information in the climate survey, um how do you how do you clean the data? And by that I mean something very specific. The very first question here is what is your gender or gender identity? Female, male, other? I prefer not to say prefer not to answer. So my daughter's in fifth grade now. When she took this in third grade, she said other. I said why did you say that?
Word walls promote critical thinking by connecting between concepts and between science disciplines. So some of the words that they're learning and using in agrocience could possibly be used in another discipline. So just like our ro robotics curriculum, this is aligned to the next generation science standards. We used an earth science science standard uh to to uh plan our curriculum here. And the idea was that we were using human activities in agriculture in thinking about how everyday life can have major effects on specifically land. This was a huge standard and it was supposed to go into land, vegetation, oceans, air. Uh but since we only had 12 sessions with students, we focused on soil, which is why many of the experiments you saw were with dirt. And then again, thinking about how communities can choose a particular uh resource such as different farming methods to help protect Earth.
Now, go back to your language, the one that you just had. Yeah. So, you'll see the same thing again. Yellows are moving to green. This is where not a whole lot of blue, but at least we moved them to green. 9.3 to 22.5. I'm not worried about blue. blue is that's it's above grade level this side of the bell curve or what yeah whatever it's yeah um that's green so why I like comparing year-over-year is that the standards don't change because sometimes standards from fifth to sixth grade are decidedly different fifth grade procedural sixth grade um application they change a lot and so if I'm comparing a constant. I'd rather compare the standards and move the kids. But um I see I see the rationale on comparing both. But that's why you you answered my question on on the testing part. Okay. So yeah, I'm I'm happy now with that part.
She said because I felt like being silly. So what did what are the scientific processes you use to sort of clean the data to make it relevant? Because if kids are just answering for silly reasons, if 100% of them do, then it's 100% silly. Tim, we're really looking for trends. You know, we're looking we compare year to year. We look at boys. We look at girls. We look at the other category to see if there's anything that stands out to us. Is there an area of the building? Is there a particular grade level? Are all the boys saying that this is an issue? Are all the girls saying that this is an issue? I I'll just give you an example. When I was the principal at Chapman School, we saw that um people were talking about uh the bathroom on the top floor and that's where our um uh fifth and sixth graders were and we they were saying that that kids were, you know, wading up paper towels in there and people kids didn't want to go to the bathroom there because some kids were misbehaving is is what we gleaned from that.
And of course, we have our science and engineering practices and our crosscutting concepts. So, as I said, obtaining and combining information from different types of sources to to explain this problem of how does agriculture impact the land and all the other questions that link together throughout this lesson. Our crosscutting concepts were um a system can be described in terms of its components. Uh students were able to learn about soil systems, right? We have soil health, erosion, soil fertility. They learned a lot about water systems, irrigation. We touched on water conf conservation and human systems like farming, cultural practices. And that's how we tie together that three-dimensional learning for our agrocience STEM program. So, unfortunately, our meeting tonight over overlapped with elementary evening conferences, which is why we only had had Tanner here tonight. Thanks, Tanner. Uh, so we do have some quotes from other teachers who are at conferences right now.
Okay. Okay. Um I'm not happy with the qualitative stuff, but I get this. Does Does everybody on the board see what was happening? that that basically if you squish the red it has to come out somewhere else and it seems to be squishing out into the green quite a bit. Yeah. Okay. Which is which is where we want to be which is exactly where where I what I needed to see. In order to help me make my decision. Now how much of this progress is because of EI? i.e. i.e. excuse me I believe that the standards unwrapping the end of standard assessment but the third prong of that triangle is the way we do business in the classroom of allowing kids to engage in well um wellplanned task where kids are talking to each other. They're trying to figure it out and they're explaining, justifying, defending, expanding.
And so we ended up, you know, made sure that the teachers knew about this. um put some things into place, stuck another security camera in that corner to better watch that area and and we handled it. And the next time around we we saw that that that behavior had we diminished that it had decreased. We we had, you know, solved it basically. So that's what we're looking at. One or a number of students who fill out something or don't answer the right way. You know, we're we're just looking at overall trends and where we could make improvements. Remember this data gives us information to bring back to our safe school climate committee so that we can make changes to our safe school climate plan. So th those are the sort of the generalities that we're looking at. Then we further look at well what did the students say?
Uh, so we'll just read a couple of these to you uh from the teachers at Chester Public Schools. Jenna Divine, who's a fourth grade Highland teacher, said, "My students enjoyed the robotics program so much. The program was incredibly engaging for them. The hands-on learning opportunities allowed my students to thrive as they were able to actively participate in problemsolving tasks. This program fostered critical thinking and teamwork in a way that was both fun and meaningful. Christine Collins, fifth grade, Highland. My students loved the hands-on learning and the trial and error components of robotics. The productive struggle was good for them. Liz Yelis, who's a fourth grade teacher at Highland, said, "My teachers were engaged and excited about robotics from day one. I loved watching them learn coding and apply their knowledge to real world tasks. This unit not only provided hands-on learning, but it also helped them use their problem solving and growth mindset skills." Jessica West, fifth grade, Norton.
This is learning at high levels, critical thinking skills. And I believe when they learn like that, it's not passive learning. It's active learning. I think that goes to long-term memory. And I think it's going to be applied on state and Galileo testing eventually. That is my theory. I wish you had left the word eventually off. Um, well, no, you're you are I haven't proved it yet. No, no, no, no. You got you're you're doing you're doing a good job. Thank you for doing this and answering my questions because maybe the rest of the people won't even want to talk to me. Um, they'll have the PowerPoint I will never go first again. No, no traffic next time. Don't Don't even go there. That you you've done your job. You've done it very very well. My question is still um if you have three basically two classrooms.
What did the parents say? What did the teachers say? What are the commonalities there? Because then we would also need to take action in those areas. And all of this is anonymous. So it's not like it becomes tracked back to any one person that and that's really validity survey validity is a challenge in any anonymous survey anything. So you hope that the N is high enough that and you're making and you are looking for trends and outliers uh to navigate that but you know it's to keep them from all answering a on every question too. So the the vast majority of our students answer it honestly and staff and um you know you have to know that there that's why there's a um margin of error on these like you know the god's honest truth or fact right so and that's built into every year so when you are looking at trends year-over-year it's it's helpful and so This is going to come back to us for a vote.
Students in my class are excited about the STEM program. Through collaboration with their peers, they have worked hard to problem solve and deepen their thinking. STEM has sparked enthusiasm and creativity in our classroom. So, we would like to thank you again for moving this meeting up so we could both attend. Uh, thank you for your support. We'd also like to thank Cheshire Ed Foundation who provided the grant for the robots. uh Marlene and Kevin for supporting us as we developed and implemented this curriculum. Of course, all the teachers who welcomed us into their classroom uh across the district and Mike uh Salamini for helping us with the video taping and all this tech today. Yes. Tiding. Yeah.