ANOVA Case study

One of the great challenges affecting suburban school districts is staffing and space issues as it relates to Kindergarten. Many kindergarten programs in Connecticut are still half day, challenging those teachers to cover an ever-increasing curriculum in a short amount of time.

What about those students who struggle? How are they not "left behind" in an increasingly rigorous educational setting? One administrator attempted to address this issue by starting a Kindergarten "Buddy Program." The buddy program was an extended day program for those students at risk that took place after the first kindergarten session. Those students had intensive work for approximately 1 hour and then were bused home. This was a potential cost-effective solution. To see if is was an effective instructional strategy, a posttest was given to subjects in three settings (those of the Kindergarten buddy program, those in a traditional half day kindergarten program, and those in a full-day kindergarten program. A description of the assessment is provided below:

contributed by Frank LaBanca, EdD

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test: Level PR (Pre-Reading)

Paper-Pencil version only Find info about the G-M Reading Test here [1]

Designed to help teachers discover what students at the end of Kindergarten and students at the beginning Grade 1 know about important background concepts upon which beginning reading skills are built.

Subtest 1, Literacy Concepts, evaluates students' understanding of the nature and uses of written English and their understanding of words and phrases commonly used in beginning reading instruction.

Subtest 2, Oral Language Concepts (Phonological Awareness), evaluates students' abilities to attend to the basic structure of spoken English words, especially to phonemic units (speech sounds), which are the basis of the alphabetic principle and much beginning reading instruction.

Subtest 3, Letters and Letter/Sound Correspondences, evaluates students' knowledge of letters and their abilities to relate them to sounds.

Subtest 4, Listening (Story) Comprehension, evaluates students' abilities to understand important elements of connected text. Designed for nonreaders, answer choices for Level PR predominantly consist of pictures.

contributed by Frank LaBanca, EdD

Another ANOVA Study

Instructors are often concerned when giving multiple-day tests because students taking the test later in the exam period may have an advantage over students taking the test early in the exam period due to information leakage.

What about those students who also can seek tutoring for extra support to give them advantage of increased scoring?

However, exam scores seemed to decline as students took the same test later in a multi-day exam period (Mouritsen and Davis, 2012). This study reports mean test score analysis of a four-day exam period. Students with higher cumulative GPAs tend to take the exam earlier in the testing period. The majority of students take the exam the last day of the testing period. Test score variance for each test day also increases with each test day. One-way ANOVA analysis finds that mean test scores of students who take the test later in the test period significantly decline.

This study concluded that there was no significant impact on increasing test scores for students who took the exam in later in the multi-day testing window.

Mouritsen, M. L.; Davis, J. T.; Jones, S. C. (2016). Journal of Learning in Higher Education: ANOVA Analysis of Student Daily Test Scores in Multi-Day Test Periods, v12 n2 p73-82 (EJ1139744)

• • Contributed by Tania Nicole Sutherland **