CMT And CAPT Scores Released By The State

By Eliza Hallabeck

The state released scores for the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) and Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) Thursday, July 15. Results can be found on the Connecticut Department of Education’s website, www.ctreports.com.

This week, Assistant Superintendent Linda Gejda said work is already underway to compare Newtown’s results with the different schools in the district, the overall results with other schools in Newtown’s District Reference Group, and with how students in the state fared overall compared to Newtown students.

Results from this work will be presented to the school board in September, when Dr Gejda will give her yearly CMT result analysis to the Board of Education.

According to the state’s website, more than 400 Newtown students were tested during this year’s CMT administration in each grade level of the test, third through eighth. The CMT tests mathematics, reading, and writing.

Overall, Dr Gejda said, math scores in the district have continued to be stronger than other areas tested in the CMT, “and they continue to improve. And we like to see that,” she said.

Reading scores across the district had some improvements, but not all of the grades tested saw improvement. Dr Gejda said ways to increase the grades that did not see reading scores improve are being looked into.

In writing, “We had some mixed results,” said Dr Gejda.

Students taking the CMT in Newtown scored at or above what students achieved on the test last year, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is third graders in writing, which had a score of 78.3 percent at/above goal this year and 83.9 percent at/above goal last year.

Results by grade performance are also available at www.newtownbee.com for both the CMT and CAPT.

The CAPT is administered to students in tenth grade and measures mathematics, science, reading across the disciplines, and writing across the disciplines.

Overall the roughly 400 students who took the CAPT during the last academic school year scored higher than students across the state. In mathematics, for example, Newtown students scored 73.8 percent at/above goal while students across the state scored 48.9 percent at/above goal; 95.4 percent of Newtown students scored at/above proficiency while 95.4 percent of students in the state scored 78.8 percent in math.