Students in Roseville, Michigan are demonstrating significant growth in reading and math competencies after Roseville Community Schools introduced Direct Instruction at district elementary schools in the fall of 2012. The implementation began with Corrective Reading as an intensive intervention for low performing students in 4th and 5th grade while Reading Mastery was concurrently introduced as a core program for students in kindergarten through grade 2. The next year, the district added grades 3 and 4 to the implementation, and by 2015, all seven elementary schools in the district were implementing Direct Instruction in kindergarten through grade 5. The efforts are paying off. In 2012, only half of Kment Elementary's 3rd graders were passing the state exam. Just a year later, nearly 60% were passing. The performance of the cohorts is also improving. The group of 3rd graders who had a 50% pass rate in 2012-13 had nearly 70% of the group passing the following year.
With the success Kment was finding with Direct Instruction reading programs, the district rolled out DI math programs shortly after. The model was similar to reading. One site, Kment, began using Connecting Math Concepts: Comprehensive Edition (CMCCE) as the core math program school wide, K through 4. The following year, the other six elementary schools added the math program, and this fall, all seven Kment elementary schools will add level five of CMCCE. Results of implementing DI math programs has yielded positive results, as well. In the fall of 2013 when the district introduced CMCCE, only 48% of the students scored at the Tier 1 level on the AIMSweb measure of Computational Skills (COMP) and even fewer (37%) were at this level on the measure of Concepts and Applications (CAP). By the spring of 2014, after only one year of instruction with CMCCE, 80% of the students were in Tier 1 on the measure of Computations and 62% were in Tier 1 on the measure of Concepts and Applications.
NIFDI's Department of Research has released a technical report with additional details of the results at Kment Elementary in Roseville, Michigan, which you can download free. For questions about the report, feel free to contact NIFDI's Director of Research, Dr. Jean Stockard, at research@nifdi.org or 877.485.1973.
