In fall 2004, Saint Paul Public Schools Superintendent Patricia Harvey directed the district’s Office of Research and Development to conduct a qualitative study of schools that demonstrated above average growth in reading or math between the Spring 2003 and Spring 2004 administrations of the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT10). Overall leadership of the resulting study was provided by Kent Pekel, Executive Director of Research and Development, and the study was conducted by Dr. Mary Chorewycz, Director of the Department of School Quality Reviews and Improvement Planning, and Dr. Marian Heinrichs, Program Evaluator with the Department of Research, Evaluation, and Accountability.
Dr. Chorewycz and Dr. Heinrichs contacted the principals of the schools identified as Promising Practices sites and arranged to meet with those individuals whose work in 2003-04 would have impacted the progress of students who demonstrated high rates of growth on the SAT10. They met with individuals, small groups and large groups of staff at the 24 sites. The Promising Practices Project (PPP) interviews were held in December 2004 and January 2005.
Within the PPP interviews, school staff members reflected on their work of the previous school year and delineated specifically what they did within the 2003-04 school year that they feel contributed to the high rates of progress demonstrated by their students on the 2004 Stanford Achievement Test (SAT10). A copy of the PPP interview template is included in the appendix of this study.
This report relies on the expertise and experience of educators for its findings. The purpose of this study was to gather and document the strategies that schools believe contributed to the increases in their students’ MCA scores in 2004. The information presented here represents an initial step, using qualitative methods to identify and describe the practices, rather than seeking further quantitative verification of their connection to the documented growth. Many of the schools are employing similar strategies and have experienced similar changes, and these same strategies have been shown in the literature to be related to best practice.
