Client:
California Department of Education (CDE)
Core work:
Research, Design, Development, Psychometrics
A joint ETS-CDE team collaborated on a common problem: finding the best way to summarize student growth scores for students within a school, district or student group to reduce the “yo-yo effects” of average growth scores fluctuating from year to year.
ETS researchers proposed the use of a weighted average to improve year-to-year stability of group-level growth scores, which reduces disparities in the accuracy and stability of the group growth scores across schools and districts of varying sizes, produces a fairer measure and emphasizes data over shorter periods of time than other smoothing approaches.
This new approach helps school and district leaders get better evaluations of recent progress.
ETS and the CDE are currently collaborating to design visualizations of the growth model’s results specifically for audiences like parents, teachers, school and district administrators, and the general public, to help everyone understand what California’s students’ growth looks like.
Adopting and implementing this growth measure is a true example of practice and research informing one another.
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