Meeting the Redesigned CCRPI Indicators

4 ways ThinkCERCA helps schools prepare for Georgia's College and Career Ready Performance Index

With the redesign of Georgia's College and Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI), school leaders can now follow a more simplified process to impact the CCRPI score.

The redesigned CCRPI looks at four main indicators (plus one more at the high school level):

• Content Mastery
• Progress
• Closing Gaps
• Readiness
• Graduation Rate (high school only)

As a literacy partner, helping schools to realize high achievement for all students is part of what we do. Here's how ThinkCERCA can equip Georgia schools to meet the four main components of the CCRPI score:

Content Mastery

The content mastery indicator looks at whether students are "achieving at the level necessary to be prepared for the next grade, college, or career." The indicator is determined by student achievement scores in the four core subjects – math, science, social studies, and ELA.

ThinkCERCA integrates with classes across the curriculum to provide extensive writing supports to students in math, science, social studies, and ELA. As decades of research by the University of Chicago shows, writing across these subjects can impact achievement on multiple assessments.

In each core subject, here’s how writing helps students to achieve content mastery:

• Math - Mathematical reasoning is a foundational math skill. When students defend their mathematical solutions in writing, they provide clear evidence of their understanding. Writing forces students to slow down and explain a solution in their own words.
• Science - In science classes, students can use the argumentative writing process to generate explanations by critically examining the claims, evidence, reasoning, and counterarguments scientists would consider in developing their ideas.
• Social Studies - By writing arguments in social studies, students learn how to assess the causes and effects of historical events. They engage in a process that explicitly requires consideration of multiple perspectives and evaluation of evidence.
• English Language Arts - In ELA classes, students build the foundational skills of literacy that transfer over to other disciplines. Providing opportunities to write about, discuss, and debate complex ideas helps students tackle concepts in all subjects.

ThinkCERCA provides the platform, pedagogy, and professional development to help teachers make these instructional shifts to writing. Our differentiated lessons provide teachers and students with a flexible framework that guides writers through constructing a cohesive argument. As students strengthen their argumentation skills, studies show they can achieve an average of two years of growth in a single school year.

Fayette County, which integrated ThinkCERCA across the curriculum, also saw significant impact from a school-wide writing initiative. For the class of 2021 in Fayette County, the proportion of students scoring "proficient" or "advanced" on the Milestones’ Extended Writing Task nearly doubled — rising from 36 percent in 2015 (without ThinkCERCA) to 70 percent in 2016 (with ThinkCERCA).

Progress

The progress indicator on CCRPI seeks to identify the amount of growth that students demonstrate "relative to academically-similar students." It looks at three markers of progress in particular:

• Scores in English language arts
• Scores in mathematics
• Progress towards language proficiency (EL students)

The Georgia Department of Education notes that "ELA and mathematics will receive 90% of the weight, and progress towards English language proficiency will receive 10% of the weight."

In addition to the aforementioned math and ELA lessons, ThinkCERCA also provides literacy supports for students gaining English language proficiency. English language development features in ThinkCERCA's writing lessons include:

• Definitions and parts of speech for Tier 2 (cross-content) and Tier 3 (content-specific) words
• A topic overview to help students build background knowledge and make connections to concepts and themes of a lesson
• Audio-assisted reading – a real human voice that models fluency and intonation– to help students comprehend complex texts
• Sentence frames to provide students with the structure for writing academic language
• Interactive graphic organizers to help students organize their thinking, develop conceptual understanding, and facilitate comprehension
• Reading Practice lessons that help students build background knowledge in content areas.

As school leaders know, it's essential that students learning English have frequent opportunities to hone their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills across the curriculum. ThinkCERCA provides features to help facilitate those opportunities.

Closing Gaps

The CCRPI also evaluates whether "all students and all student subgroups [are] making improvements in achievement rates."

According to the Georgia Department of Education, the closing gaps indicator "sets an expectation of improvement or maintenance of high achievement for all students and provides an opportunity for schools to demonstrate improvement."

With regular ThinkCERCA usage, schools have been successful in closing the achievement gap for student subgroups. While there's no one-size-fits-all solution to close the gap, a good first step can be to meet the specific needs of individual students through personalized learning. In ThinkCERCA, lessons and texts are differentiated for students by reading level, so that students can engage with material that's appropriate for them. Additionally, these leveled texts save teachers bountiful time in searching for resources. That time saved can be used to provide personalized instruction to students who need it most.

As ThinkCERCA's Executive Director of School Innovation notes in a blog post on the topic, "by meeting the individual needs of our students, we can give them the boost to perform at the level we know they’re capable of and work toward reducing the disparities observed in student outcomes."

Learn More About Empowering Your Team to Close Gaps:

Readiness

For the readiness indicator, Georgia schools are asked, "Are students participating in activities preparing them for and demonstrating readiness for the next level, college, or career?"

ThinkCERCA firmly believes that writing is the path to critical thinking, and writing prepares students for a complex, changing, 21st-century world.

By 2020, the World Economic Forum predicts that the most highly valued job skills will be:

• Complex Problem Solving
• Critical Thinking
• Creativity

These are the skills students will need to succeed in their careers. These are the skills that are honed by regular writing.

Highly skilled writers, Dr. Ronald T. Kellogg of St. Louis University notes, are "able to maintain and manipulate in working memory representations of the author's ideas, the text itself, and the prospective reader's interpretation of the text."

In short, highly skilled writers practice complex problem solving. They exercise critical thinking. And through writing, they express creativity.

With ThinkCERCA's writing lessons, teachers can prepare students to succeed at the next level, college, and career.

Read about how Fayette County saw remarkable student growth on the Georgia Milestones in just one year: