Carson Calhoun

Summary:
I read the article Decision Points and Considerations for Identifying Rural Districts That Have
Closed Student Achievement Gaps. Ultimately rural areas have trouble funding schools to help
students pay as well as keep teachers on a lower salary. This is a study to test how to effectively
close the achievement gaps in rural areas. The author tested the economically advantaged
households versus the economically disadvantaged households. She explains why multiple
measures should be taken into consideration, such as student performance, academic success,
academic growth, and postsecondary readiness. It is stated that to close a gap, the
achievement of the lower performing group must increase faster than the achievement of the
higher performing group. She also explains how other factors play into the subgroup being
studied, such as an area only have a small percentage of the school on the federal lunch
program. The achievement gap will be measured in simply size reduction or increased over
time. There are three charts included in this article. They display the trend lines the average
information of the reduction of the achievement measures in three categories: reading, math,
and writing. They compare students academic achievement from low income households versus
higher income households. The author explains how the measured data will be group. She
states it will fall into two categories by counting and averaging. Next steps being considered are
to explain the analysis of why the achievement gap was closed and to closely examine district
policies and practices.

Rhetorical Analysis:
The purpose of the article is to show how achievement gaps occur and what hypotheses can be
formed to find a solution and what the next steps are being taken to identify how certain districts
closed their achievement gap. It is an semi-experimental article to identify an achievement gap
between low income households and higher income households and find out how it can be
closed. The authors of the article are Michael J. Culberston and Shelley H. Billig through RMC
Research Corporation. It is located on the Regional Education Laboratory for viewing. It was
prepared for the Institute of Educational Sciences. The audience for this article would be anyone
on the school board to show them how a student in a low income household compares to a
student in a high income household. Also, students and teachers could use this article to get a
sense of how they can grow and increase their academic achievements and success. The
genre is very informative and non fiction. It is an experimental article and is the first step to
forming a full experiment elaborating extently on the first steps to be taken to finding a reason
and/or solution to the achievement gap in rural districts. It includes charts to help visualize the
data being taken into consideration for the hypotheses being formed. Multiple references are
included to credit the authors sources for their work and explains what ideas they are building
off of.

Culberston, Michael J., and Shelley H. Billig. "Decision Points and Considerations for Identifying
Rural Districts That Have Closed Student Achievement Gaps." Regional Education Laboratory
(2016): 1-9. Web.
Summary #2:
This is a study to test how to effectively close the achievement gaps in rural areas. The author
tested the economically advantaged households versus the economically disadvantaged
households. The author includes different claims which explains why multiple measures should
be taken into consideration, such as student performance, academic success, academic growth,
and postsecondary readiness. There are three charts included in this article and display the
trend lines as average information of the reduction of the achievement measures in three
categories: reading, math, and writing. They compare students academic achievement from low
income households versus higher income households.