District 127 Acts to Better Prepare Students For ACT Test – PART I

Any high school junior or senior can tell you how nerve wracking it is to take the ACT and then have to await the test results with equal trepidation. Many students will tell you how they froze up during the exam and the devastating disappointment they experienced when their scores arrived much lower than what they had expected.

John Bolger, associate principal at Central and Jim Roscoe, associate principal at North, spoke at length with Patch about their efforts to spearhead a new direction in tackling this issue at Grayslake’s High Schools.

"Previously we had looked at the data from our kids who took practice exams and determined there was a small group of students who were on the bubble, just short of being really successful; i.e., they were scoring in the 17-19 range," said Bolger. "We felt that with a little push, given just a little extra help and support, we could get those students over the top to be more successful; that is, to score beyond a 21 or 22."

As both Bolger and Roscoe noted, in years past the district has contracted with outside agencies such as Revolution Prep in order to help kids get ready for the ACT exam which is taken by all Illinois high school juniors in late April of each school year. The results in District 127 have varied, but have generally fallen short of the expectations of the administration and teachers. In addition, the commercial programs available are certainly not without substantial financial cost.

These commercial agencies all used prescribed strategies that were conceived of by adults and deemed to be effective by adults from their adult perspective," Roscoe said.

All sophomores take a practice test to prepare for the actual ACT. The district also had its juniors take a practice ACT in the fall. The information from these two practice tests was gathered and duly analyzed.

"When we had identified the ‘bubble kids,’ we then asked them to give up half of their lunch period during the second semester to get extra help. Obviously, there was a great deal of resistance to this from the kids and their parents," said Bolger. "We as adults and administrators needed to realize that some kids really do need that full 50 minute lunch period to relax, socialize with friends, reconnect, etc. Some have special needs that already require help during part of that lunch period."

As Bolger and Roscoe are quick to point out, there are several problems with preparing the kids to successfully complete the ACT. First of all, it is not an intelligence test. It is a test of endurance. All high school students are used to taking 45-50 minute assessments that fit within the time period of a schedule of classes. Students do have final exams which can be 90 minutes in length, but those only occur twice a year and only in the high school setting. Now they are expected to concentrate for 3 to 3 ½ hours on a single exam which has the added pressure of being a significant determinant in their post- graduation futures.

"The training of a marathoner," said Bolger "is quite different than that for a sprinter. You can’t train someone in a sprint format and then realistically expect them to do well in a marathon event."

Additionally, the students are operating under time restraints where they have to read extended texts. "Most are just not accustomed to having to read this type of text quickly and then bounce back and forth between the very specific questions and the related passages to find the answers asked of them on the exam," Bolger said.

The test is designed to measure what the students have learned through the 10th grade in Math, Reading, Science and English. Most students are able to do well on the content part of the exam.

"With some of our advanced students, however, they haven’t seen the types of math questions asked on the ACT since they were in 7th or 8th grade," Bolger said. "They wind up missing some of the easier problems. We have an obligation to go back and review that material for those advanced students."

Bolger, Roscoe and Rita Fischer, district director of Curriculum and Instruction engaged in several protracted conversations about these concerns. "We looked at this ACT conundrum that we were all dealing with," said Bolger. "And we asked ourselves the following questions: ‘What do our kids need in order to be successful on the ACT? What can we afford? What strategy or program is going to be the most effective?’"

The building leadership teams at both schools meet once a week. The group consists of the principal, the two associate principals, the athletic director and the department chairpersons.

"Back in January of this year," said Bolger, "we (the leadership teams) came to the collective realization that we should be asking these questions of some of our seniors who have been through the process. So at North and Central we asked a panel of 8-10 seniors with a wide range of abilities and interests to come to our next leadership team meeting to share some of their thoughts, feelings and anxieties. We wanted them to tell us what worked and what didn’t work."

What they learned from those student panels was a collective epiphany for the administrators.

(See what our students and administrators discovered in Part II of this article that will be on Patch tomorrow.)