Math should not be the only area of focus. Reading levels and writing abilities need to also be examined. It is difficult for non-math teachers to positively impact their student’s math scores, but they can however hopefully teach reading and writing. To determine how to do this, we need to first know if what we’ve been doing has worked. Below is a graph depicting the average reading level for 8th grade students in Delaware.
Unfortunately when examined, the reading levels are not much better than the math. It appears that for the last decade, both math and reading levels have decreased throughout the State as a whole. Table 3 shows the average reading level out of 500 for students in Delaware. Just like with the math scores, reading levels have decreased.
It is interesting that the average reading score has also decreased by a similar amount. Scores have dropped from an average of 265.98/500 down to 259.68. This is around a 2% decrease in average reading levels. Again, this is not massive. There would be more cause for alarm if it were a larger drop in scores than just two percent. But again, the larger implication is that Delaware has not shown growth in the areas of Math or Reading in nearly a decade. We can then make the assumption that whatever statewide initiatives that Delaware has been implementing have not been effective.
Data Analysis 