Kate--

How do you account for the long retention rate?  Other programs report 
this as a difficulty.

Thanks.

Andrea

On Apr 19, 2007, at 1:31 PM, Kate Diggins wrote:


> I'd like to respond to David Rosen's question regarding programs which 

> track student gains beyond the bounds of the fiscal year.  At my 

> program, students stay for an average of 15 months, and they are 

> permitted to stay for five years if they wish (and many of them do), 

> so we track them from start to finish.  We are a small program, 

> serving about 250 students a year, so we take a fairly low-tech 

> approach.  After pretesting with BEST "Plus" and BEST Literacy, we 

> plot their scores on line graphs (two separate graphs - one for each 

> of the two tests) and continue to plot their scores for each 

> subsequent test.  As time goes by, the lines representing a student's 

> progress slope gradually upward across the pages. This is a graphic 

> that the students can easily understand, and it enables us to see 

> which skill areas require emphasis for individual students.  Having a 

> complete picture of a student's testing history also allows us to show 

> students that an occasional disappointing test sco

>  re may be an aberration from a generally upward trend.

>

> Kate Diggins

> Director of Adult Education

> Guadalupe Schools

> (801) 531-6100 (x-1107)

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