Strong Start ®Assessments

Summary

Overall 81% to 100% (depending on the category) of the children made significant, excellent or outstanding gains! (There was exception in one category i.e. ESL Words--Percentage Towards a Goal. There were only 2 children in this category. One did exceptionally well and one made little gain, thereby producing a calculation of only 50% of the children in this category making significant, excellent or outstanding gains.)
505 students are represented in the data
57 schools are included in this summary with an average of 8.9 students per school
77.43% of the students are thought to be the type of child for whom the program was written [i.e. the “Target Group”]
7.33% of the students are included in the “English as a second language factor” group
15.25% of the students included in the group are being monitored as possibly having a learning challenge that will result in their needing ongoing support in their early educational career.
Over 453 volunteers worked for over 9,693 hours to implement this session.

Notes

This spring session is for Senior Kindergarten students (and the fall session is for grade one students). Twenty-seven percent of these Kindergarten students in the program have been recommended to repeat the program in the fall. They made good gains this spring and it is felt that the program is working for them and that they just need a little longer to get to a high level of achievement.
The program has 28 words that can be taught using 20 books. The program asks volunteers to work with one book per session and hence only 10 books in the program. The additional books are provided to accommodate children who can advance further. It is left to the discretion of the volunteer to determine how many books beyond ten would be used in the program. This usually means that many children may not be exposed to all 28 words. The assessment, however, is based on 28 words. Therefore it is usually expected that the results will be lower in Words since not all Kindergarten children work with all 28 words in the program. In this particular spring 2004 session, however, the children surprised us by doing better than expected.

We have many successes beyond these statistics. Have a look at our stories