Younger Students' Scores Rising in Math, Reading

Results from the Connecticut Mastery Test -- the tests known as the CMT taken by children in grades 3-8 -- were released Wednesday morning. You can view your school's scores here.

Statewide, scores in most subject areas across grade levels were better than last year. In addition, there continued to be incremental improvement in most subject areas over the last few years. The most consistent growth since 2006 was in math, which jumped more than 10 percentage points in several grades. There was also significant progress in reading, especially at the middle school level.  Writing scores remained flat.

“It is encouraging to see that our public schools are making progress by increasing the numbers of students who are moving into the proficient level of performance and from the proficient level into the goal level,” Acting Commissioner George Coleman said in a prepared statement.

“However, our greatest challenges are ahead of us. We must accelerate our efforts to improve the outcomes for those students who are at risk of scoring below Proficient, while at the same time challenging all students to perform at higher levels.” 

The test is administered annually in March to students across Connecticut. It tests math, reading and writing.  Grades 5 and 8 are also tested in science. The test was taken by 250,000 children and has five levels of performance for each content area: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Goal and Advanced. This test is used by the federal government to measure yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind law. 

2011 CMT: Percent of students at/above goal 

            2006 2010 2011

Grade 3

Math, 56.3 62.6 63.3

Reading, 54.4 57.1,  58.4

Writing 61.1, 58.3, 61.1

Grade 4

Math, 58.8, 67.2, 67.3

Reading, 57.8, 60, 62.5

Writing, 62.8, 63.6, 65.5

Grade 5 

Math, 60.7, 72.6, 72.7

Reading, 60.9, 61.8, 61.4

Writing, 65, 68.2, 66.8

Science, 57.9, 60.2

Grade 6

Math, 58.6, 71, 71.6

Reading, 63.6, 74.9, 76

Writing, 62.2, 65.9, 65.3

Grade 7

Math, 57, 68.8, 68.7

Reading, 66.7, 77.5, 77.8

Writing, 60, 61.3, 58.9

Grade 8

Math, 58.3, 67.5, 66.8

Reading, 66.7, 73.4, 74.7

Writing, 62.4, 62.7, 64.8

Science, 63.1, 63.3

 

Follow our Fairfield County sites for town-by-town coverage of 2011 standardized test scores in the coming days. 

 

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