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Meadowlane Elementary School

"SuccessMaker has met all our needs. It's an integral, necessary part of our education program. I don't know how anyone could choose anything else because there's nothing else out there like it. SuccessMaker is it."
     George Kovachy, Principal, Meadowlane Elementary School

Highlights

In 1999, Meadowlane Elementary received a "D" in the Florida state accountability program. The school needed to improve student achievement on state and national tests, as well as in the classroom.

School/District Profile

Located in an urban area of Hialeah, Florida, Meadowlane Elementary enrolls over 1,400 students in pre-kindergarten through grade five. Meadowlane's student population is 97 percent Hispanic, two percent White, and one percent Asian. Eighty-one percent of students recieve free and reduced-price lunches, and nearly 27 percent of students have limited English proficiency. The school is part of the Miami-Dade County Public School System which serves more than 350,000 students speaking over 87 different dialects.

Challenge

The challenge at Meadowlane Elementary is for students to reach and maintain each year a Level 3 or higher on the FCAT test in reading and math.

Solution

Meadowlane Elementary implemented SuccessMaker from Pearson Digital Learning in 1994. All students in kindergarten through grade five use the self-paced, interactive courseware daily. Kindergarten, first and second grade students work on SuccessMaker math and reading courses for a total of 14 to 20 minutes a day, while third, fourth and fifth graders spend 30 minutes a day on the courses. The courseware provides one-on-one instruction that allows each student to progress at his or her own level.

The technology coordinator and teachers align SuccessMaker curriculum with Florida's Sunshine State Standards, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) and the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT). The strands in SuccessMaker math and reading courses can be set to address specific content areas that are tested. Meadowlane found that students who are successful in SuccessMaker math and reading courses are successful in the same areas of the FCAT as well.

Meadowlane established a school-wide goal that every student achieve at least 70 percent proficiency in the courseware each day. The technology coordinator and the teachers reguarly monitor student performance and growth using the SuccessMaker management system, which is seamlessly integrated into the courseware. Using the system's assessment tools and on-demand reports, they can easily see which students are and are not meeting the school-wide goal, identify areas of weakness, and provide targeted practice and intervention.

Results

Some additions for the 2001-2002 school year included fifty new SuccessMaker licenses available for home use during the next three years, and two mobile wireless units, allowing classrooms without computer access to use SuccessMaker for the first time.

From 1999 to 2000, Meadowlane Elementary improved three performance grades- from a "D" to an "A"-due to significant improvement in student performance on the FCAT. Fifth grade students' mean scores increased 42 points from 1999 to 2000.

FCAT scores are organized into five achievement levels, with Level 1 being the lowest scoring group and Level 5 the highest. From 1999 to 2000, Meadowlane saw a dramatic decrease in the number of fifth graders in Level 1 and an increase in the higher scoring groups.

From 1999 to 2000, fifth graders' scores on the SAT also rose significantly, with average gains of 19 points in reading and math. Average scores in reading jumped from 33 to 52, and average scores in math climbed from 47 to 66.

What made such dramatic improvements possible from one year to the next?

Meadowlane rewrote the entire school curriculum in the grades that were tested. They aligned the SuccessMaker reading and math curriculum with their state standards and tests. The reports from the SuccessMaker management system showed teachers exactly what areas students had problems with and helped them implement instruction to improve those areas. There was also great accountability among the teachers and great support from the principal. "All those things really helped us achieve our goals", says George Kovachy, principal at Meadowlane. Kovachy also says, "We've done many things at our school to move from a 'D' to an 'A'. One of them was to improve our use of the SuccessMaker program. We sat down with the teachers and planned out exactly what we wanted to do to bring up the skills of our students, and then talked about how SuccessMaker could help us do that. SuccessMaker played an integral part in our efforts."

For the 2001-2002 school year, students at Meadowlane Elementary surpassed goals in reading and math.

• In SuccessMaker's Math Concepts and Skills course, students in kindergarten through grade five averaged 95 percent total correct in 16 hours of instruction. The initial goas was for 90 percent of the students to achieve 90 percent skills mastery.
• With a target goal of 65 percent correct or better, students taking the Reading Foundations course in kindergarten through grade four averaged an acceptable performance of 85 percent total correct in 16 hours of instruction.

As a result of Meadowlane's SuccessMaker implementation, the school was asked to present a session at the state technology conference in October 2002. Meadowlane Elementary shared the story of its successful implementation of SuccessMaker and FCAT strategies with other Florida schools.

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