BY BOBBIE HAYSE

According to data released by the National Assessment for Educational Progress released Wednesday, Kentucky students are scoring above national averages in fourth- and eighth-grade reading.

Kentucky fourth-grade students scored in line with national averages in mathematics, and eighth-graders scored slightly below national performance in mathematics. However, this places Kentucky eighth overall across the states in fourth-grade reading, up from 17th in 2013 and 26th in 2007, the results indicated.

Nick Brake, superintendent for Owensboro Public Schools, attributes the upward trend for Kentucky NAEP scores to the increased rigor of teaching the Common Core curriculum in the commonwealth.

Kentucky was one of the first states to adopt Common Core, Brake said, and for the past five years has "really stepped up the overall standards" of what's expected of the classroom level in all grades.

As far as reading scores, Brake said the district has been striving to have students reading at their grade level before they finish elementary school, which could account for the high reading scores for fourth-graders, on a local level.

"We're really putting a large emphasis in our district on literacy, with early literacy especially," he said, and attributes the district on focusing on meeting the needs of individual students on the classroom level and "really understanding where they are when they come to us and how to move them forward."

Summer reading programs have also been implemented to help students who may be lagging behind and to avoid the summer slide, he said.

Fourth-graders are among the first group of students who have had Common Core near the beginning of their educational career, so it's encouraging for Daviess County Public Schools Director of Curriculum and Assessment Jana Beth Francis to see the rise in their reading and mathematic scores.

With any major change, it takes more than one year to see the effect of curriculum change on test scores, she said.

"We're starting to see the positive effects of the Common Core curriculum," Francis said, which also involves students reading more complex texts.

As far as mathematics are concerned, eighth-graders were introduced to the new standard five years ago.

An equal split of time between fluency, conceptual understanding and application were challenging changes, she said.

"When Common Core started for them, it was a very rigorous curriculum they had to jump through," she said, but partly because of the hard work of teachers, parents and students, the scores are trending up.

The Associated Press reports that 75 percent of fourth-grade and 78 percent of eighth-grade students scored at the basic level or above in reading and 84 percent of fourth-graders, and 68 percent of eighth-graders scored at the basic level or higher.

Kentucky Education Commissioner Stephen Pruitt told the AP that he's encouraged by the performance in reading, but that efforts to improve results in middle school math will be a future emphasis.