VISION AND GOALS
The Massachusetts Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (MAHPERD) became the first state association in the country to see the potential the IHT Spirit System could provide for its members and its advocacy efforts. The vision of Executive Director Maria Melchionda sparked the development of a multi-year strategy to implement the Spirit System into all 340 school districts across the state.
The ultimate goal is for IHT to support MAHPERD and its members in their individual efforts by collecting and reporting assessments, fitness results, standards and social-emotional metrics and connect them to academic progress.
MAHPERD'S GROUND BREAKING STRATEGY: CONNECTING PE - SEL - ACADEMICS
When the Massachusetts Department of Education implemented District Determined Measures (DDMs) in 2015, which is the state’s mandatory evaluation system assessing each teacher’s impact on student learning, MAHPERD saw this challenge as a great opportunity to further prove the effectiveness and impact of health and physical education programs in schools.
By partnering with IHT, MAHPERD worked with teachers from across the state to create grade level outcomes from K-12. They also are collecting social-emotional metrics from K-12. Each teacher uses the Spirit System to collect pre and post assessments each semester, that are then rolled up to a state level. This aggregate, unified data collection is allowing teachers and districts to meet the state regulatory compliance mandates, while also providing teachers a flexible, customizable data collection instrument for their own unique data collection needs.
MEASUREMENT APPROACH
After a successful 2016 pilot year involving 2,000 elementary school-aged children in grades 1-5 in 10 diverse districts, in January 2017, MAHPERD expanded Phase II to middle and high school teachers and connected physical fitness with social and emotional learning components. Currently over 150 new teachers in 40 different school districts are participating.
During the course of the spring semester each Physical Educator will assess both grade level outcomes based on the National PE Standards and a monthly social-emotional component. Data is collected in the IHT Spirit software.
DATA COLLECTION AND RESEARCH
MAHPERD partnered with Springfield College and Professor Liz Mullin to conduct research on the initial year's pilot and data collection. Prof. Mullin began with the IRB process so MAHPERD could correlate fitness data and scores with academics, attendance and affective correlations. Research is ongoing during this first year of implementation. MAHPERD, Springfield College and IHT look forward to sharing these results once complete.
Interested in joining the MAHPERD Statewide Data Collection initiative? Send us an email below to get started.
IN THE NEWS: MAHPERD AND IHT
2017 - Mass. state association to measure student SEL progress
With its state Board of Education focusing on Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) across the Commonwealth, Massachusetts physical education teachers will soon have a way to quantify how students master those essential skills as they collect data measuring student progress in PE.
FULL STORY
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