Gaining High School Achievement in Agriscience (2001)

High-stakes testing has emerged as a major molder of practice in schools today. Teachers want their students to make good scores on standardized achievement tests. Students typically want the best scores they can. Working together, teachers and students can participate in learning activities that promote higher scores. A number of educational practices are used in agricultural education throughout the United States. These are typically and commonly accepted as ways to teach in agricultural education. Are these practices efficient? Do they lead to high student achievement? The commonly accepted ways to teach include, among others, the three major program components: classroom and lab instruction, supervised experience, and FFA. Within each of these, specific techniques are used. Some of the techniques have been used for many years; others have emerged in the last few years. No research has been done to identify the most efficient ways to teach by looking at student test scores on a nationwide basis. The instruction has typically involved considerable psychomotor learning in labs, part-time jobs, and student project ownership, Efforts to help students internalize the related theory and principles, i.e., the background knowledge, have often been minimal. It is this background knowledge that standardized tests typically assess. Teachers in schools where the Agri-Science Achievement test (AAT) was administered were asked to provide background information about themselves and their schools. This information has been used to identify selected attributes leading to high student test scores. The AAT was developed to measure mastery of technical information in agriculture. Emphasis was on basic, science-based agriculture classes. The AAT has two forms: Basic and Advanced. The Basic Form is for administration after the first course in science-based agriculture. The Advanced Form is designed to be administered after the second course or later. Each form has sixty test items, developed using state curriculum guides, blue prints, and other competencies/outcomes of agricultural education. A national panel of test item validators was used to help assure validity and reliability. Tests were field tested in a number of schools and then administered nationally. The number of students enrolled in a high school is related to test scores. Students in high schools with enrollments of 1,000 or fewer students had, on the average, 37 percent higher test scores on the Basic Form of the AAT than those in high schools with over 1,000 students. Interpretation: Students have higher test scores in schools with 1, 000 or fewer students. The number of students in class sections appears not to be as important in test score achievement as has been thought. If an enrollment of 12 students is selected as the breakpoint between small and large classes, the difference in student scores is negligible on the Basic AAT. On the Advanced AAT, students in smaller classes scored 18 percent higher. Interpretation: Class size is not as important with introductory or basic classes as it is with advanced classes, where students in smaller classes have higher test scores. Alternative, or block, scheduling has been implemented in high schools nationwide since the early 1990s. Advanced agriculture classes have long involved double-period scheduling, and this has provided benefits in student achievement. The findings of this research tend to support block scheduling over traditional scheduling. Students in schools that used block scheduling scored 10 percent higher on the Basic AAT. No information is reported for the advanced classes due to the small number of schools on traditional scheduling that used the Advanced AAT. Interpretation: Students in classes on block scheduling have higher test scores in basic classes than those in classes with traditional scheduling. Teacher experience, education, and gender attributes are included in this article as related to student test score achievement. …