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Overview
Why is schooling effectiveness important and how do we measure it? Effective schooling, or lack thereof, influences a student’s ultimate achievement. These schooling influences accumulate across the years and measurably affect students’ attainment at least four years beyond the grade in which the student encountered them. Without a value-added metric for measuring effective schooling, educators have no way of knowing if they are maximizing academic growth opportunities for all students.
To provide that value-added metric, SAS® EVAAS® for K-12 builds on the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) methodology developed by Dr. William L. Sanders and his colleagues at the University of Tennessee. Value-added assessment eliminates the possibility of a distorted view of effective schooling by following the progress of individual students. Schools whose students begin the year at a higher level may look effective, even if their students are gaining little ground. By the same token, schools whose students start at a lower level may appear ineffective, even if their students are making excellent progress.
Building on Sanders’ early educational research, SAS EVAAS does more than just demonstrate that effective schooling is important; it also provides the most precise and reliable way to measure schooling influence. Joining SAS in 2000, Sanders and his team – with the additional resources provided by SAS, the world’s largest privately held software company – were able to bring EVAAS reporting to the Web. Today, the SAS EVAAS service is offered as an ASP-based application. Schools can benefit from SAS EVAAS analyses without having to invest in new hardware, software or IT staff. Instead, states or districts send electronic data directly to SAS, where the data is cleaned and analyzed. The results are then reported via a secure Web application, a powerful but user-friendly diagnostic tool.
The SAS EVAAS team has more than a decade’s experience in building longitudinal student achievement databases and providing reporting that uses mixed-model, multivariate longitudinal methodologies. This statistical approach increases the utility of test scores because it dampens the measurement error associated with a single score on a single day for each individual child. The SAS EVAAS team has developed the most comprehensive reporting package of value-added metrics available in the educational market. Not only do they provide valuable diagnostic information about past practice, but they also report students’ predicted success probabilities at numerous academic milestones. These predictions for academic success (or lack of it) enable a more equitable distribution of educational resources, one that ensures that all students have the opportunity to make academic growth each year.
Fulfill the promise with opportunity
All children deserve the opportunity to realize their full potential. It is our responsibility to provide that opportunity. Every year counts. And so does every student. Within a school, growth opportunities may vary significantly. In one grade, lower-achieving students may be making less progress than they should, while in the next grade, it’s the higher-achieving students who are losing ground. Without appropriate opportunities for progress, students at any achievement level can experience suppressed growth.
What does suppressed growth mean for students? It creates an inequity in ultimate attainment that is attributable to schooling. When students experience suppressed growth over multiple years, the students’ potential attainment suffers. The cause of this inequity is beyond the control of students and their parents, and it will likely be unrecognized by policy-makers and practitioners if they lack rigorous longitudinal analyses of their test results. In the short term, students who experience suppressed growth are less likely to experience success in subsequent coursework. In the long term, the same students are more likely to leave their K-12 experience underprepared for entry-level work or for college success. This underpreparation bleeds into the economy and into higher education costs. It creates a need for developmental and remedial coursework for some students who, had their K-12 schooling been more effective, could have been successful at the college level without this additional support.
But how do we know if we’re giving every student sufficient opportunity for academic growth? How can we evaluate the effectiveness of our programs and instructional approaches? And how can we be sure that we’re targeting our resources where they’re most needed?
As schools and districts grapple with the requirements of No Child Left Behind, one fact is clear: Without precise and reliable information, educators can not be sure that they’re meeting every student’s academic needs. The testing mandate from this legislation will create the student-level measurements that are necessary for rigorous analyses of policy and program, providing enormous opportunities to go Beyond No Child Left Behind.
SAS EVAAS supplies a precise measurement of student progress over time, as well as a reliable diagnosis of opportunities for growth. As a powerful diagnostic tool, SAS EVAAS identifies which students are at risk for underachievement. Armed with this information, educators can be proactive, making sound instructional choices and using their resources more strategically to ensure that every student has the chance to succeed. SAS EVAAS also offers a rich environment for educational research. For example, TVAAS research was the first to measure the importance of effective teaching.
For more information, please read Sanders’ summary of conclusions, which was presented at the Governors Education Symposium and is based on more than 22 years of longitudinal analyses of student achievement data.
Policy-makers
Plentiful life choices and increased opportunities for all children – whose are our hopes as we define and implement educational policies. SAS EVAAS provides policy-makers with a powerful assessment tool to determine, grade by grade and subject by subject, whether all students have that opportunity. SAS EVAAS reporting supports a systematic evaluation of policy and programs to ensure that we spend our education dollars wisely. If more K-12 students are to achieve higher levels of attainment, we must maximize their opportunities to progress each year. Only then will we see more students enrolling in college prepared to do college-level work. Reducing the need for colleges and universities to offer developmental or remedial coursework will free them to make larger investments in the rigorous coursework that higher education should and must provide.
District administrators of schools
SAS EVAAS provides a bottom line progress report for the schools within your district. Each year, the reporting identifies strengths and opportunities for improvement, grade to grade, subject to subject. By following the progress of individual children, the powerful SAS EVAAS methodology extracts the most precise and reliable information possible from your longitudinally linked student test scores. It equips educators with the kind of information necessary to ensure that all students are making sufficient progress. After reviewing the analyses of previous practices and programs, educators can identify areas that need improvement and then modify curriculum, student support and instructional strategies. At the student level, educators benefit from a rigorous analysis of each student’s previous scores to assess his or her probability for success at multiple academic milestones. For more information, please read the “Measuring Impact” section in the article “The Revelations of Value-Added” from The School Administrator magazine.
Why SAS EVAAS? The quality of the information provided and the usability of the Web-based reporting are two compelling reasons for selecting SAS EVAAS. The precision and reliability of SAS EVAAS methodology provide a balanced reporting that is fair to students and educators alike. Every student’s academic needs are important. With value-added assessment, educators can focus on meeting those needs by giving every student opportunities for growth. That growth is one important measure of schooling effectiveness. Educators shouldn’t be judged solely on the basis of a snapshot of student achievement. With SAS EVAAS, they won’t be, because its measure of schooling effectiveness is based on student growth.
More simplistic approaches don’t offer the precision and reliability that SAS EVAAS methodology ensures.
| Pitfalls of simplistic approaches |
SAS EVAAS solution |
| Individual student test scores contain measurement error. |
SAS EVAAS methodology minimizes the influence of measurement error by using up to five years of data for an individual student. Analyzing all subjects simultaneously increases the precision of the estimates. |
| Commercially available software packages typically require complete test information for each student. |
By including all students in the analyses, even those with a sporadic testing history, SAS EVAAS provides the most realistic estimate of achievement available for a district or school.
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| Adjusting estimates for race and poverty results in different student expectations and hides real differences in educational performance. |
With SAS EVAAS methodology, each student serves as his or her own control, creating a level playing field and eliminating the need to adjust for race, poverty, or other socioeconomic factors. This innovative approach ensures that the results are fair to both students and educators. |
| Simplistic approaches don’t accommodate data from tests with different scales. |
SAS EVAAS allows educators to benefit from all tests, even though their scales are different. The SAS EVAAS methodology accommodates all tests that:
- are reliable
- are highly correlated with curricular standards
- have sufficient stretch in the reporting scale to measure the achievement of both very low- and very high-achieving students in a grade and subject.
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| For more detail, read a paper that was presented at the 2004 National Evaluation Institute.
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While quality of information is critical to appropriate decision making, the information must be easy to access and understand. If not, decision-making processes are likely to suffer. Across America’s schools, the technology expertise that principals demonstrate varies dramatically. SAS EVAAS delivery was designed to minimize the training necessary to access and use the reporting. The interface is intuitively understandable and first-time users are supported by the Help files linked to each report. Acknowledging that SAS EVAAS is a valuable tool for educators, The National Governors’ Association included the SAS EVAAS application in its 2003 Data-Driven Decision Making Tool Kit.
Curriculum specialists
While state standards define the curriculum and establish milestones for students by grade and subject, teachers understand that all students do not enter our classrooms with similar levels of academic preparation. A concern associated with setting standards and the testing that follows is that teachers will be too narrow in their curricular focus. SAS EVAAS reporting provides valuable feedback about curriculum implementation and the success of the instructional strategies that supported the implementation. With SAS EVAAS, users can see whether students at varying levels of previous achievement are making appropriate academic growth each year.
Early research from the TVAAS database suggested a critical need for communication across buildings regarding the academic preparedness of students. This research documented an important fact: students moving as a cohort from a feeder school to a receiving school typically demonstrate about 10% less academic growth than students who remain in the same building for the next grade. When you think about the communication that typically takes place, building to building, this is understandable. The students’ paper files are shipped to the new school, and the standardized test scores they include are not readily available to teachers. Plus, there is no attempt to analyze a student’s historical data to see whether this student will need academic support to approach proficiency or a “stretched” grade-level curriculum to keep a high achieving student actively engaged in learning.
With SAS EVAAS, individual student reporting is accessible at the desktop of every teacher who is authorized by the district to view the student-level information. Not only does this reporting include historical data, but it also includes predictions for each student at a variety of academic milestones – the upcoming grade level proficiency required by No Child Left Behind, high school graduation requirements and various college success indicators.
School principals
SAS EVAAS reporting allows principals to design their schools around the individual academic needs of their students and to use the very valuable resource of effective teaching to benefit as many students as possible. The reporting brings clarity to strategic planning and becomes a catalyst for the kinds of conversations that must take place to ensure that all students reach their potential. Together, practitioners determine how best to address the opportunities for improvement with the resources available, always focusing on the academic needs of the individual child. For more information, please read the “Addressable Issues” section in the article “The Revelations of Value-Added” from The School Administrator magazine.
Within the SAS EVAAS reporting series, student-level information is useful for determining customized programs and for communicating with parents concerning the academic plan for each student. Because the analyses use testing already required by No Child Left Behind legislation, there is no additional intrusion into valuable instructional time to provide the valuable information concerning student access to equitable learning opportunities.
Teachers
We’ve always known that good teachers are indispensable to learning. But research using SAS EVAAS in Tennessee was the first research to measure just how critical effective teaching can be for students. What isn’t as commonly known, however, is how valuable SAS EVAAS reporting can be for teachers. Over the course of a school year, SAS EVAAS reporting shows if all students are making reasonable progress. The diagnostic reports tell teachers if students at varying achievement levels have experienced growth. Based on the reporting provided, teachers can understand two things: the incoming levels of academic preparedness of their students and the growth patterns within their classrooms.
Although each district may use SAS EVAAS reporting differently, some things are consistent:
- Principals are in a better position to support first-time teachers by pairing them with a mentoring teacher who has demonstrated teaching effectiveness.
- Principals and teachers who believe that all students deserve the opportunity to grow academically are more apt to work together for the common good of all students.
- SAS EVAAS reporting pinpoints the academic growth of individual students from where they began the year rather than simply reporting their status at the end of the year.
- Practitioners are able to determine what additional support might accelerate the progress of more students toward proficiency without suppressing the growth of early high-achieving students.
- Students are actively engaged in learning that meets their academic needs – that’s what we’re striving for.
For more information, please read the article "Districts Pilot Value-Added Assessment" from The School Administrator magazine.
Parents and students
Strong parental support that encourages student academic success is an important resource for effective schooling. SAS EVAAS gives teachers, guidance counselors and principals the reliable information they need to have meaningful conversations with parents regarding appropriate instructional strategies for each child. SAS EVAAS is based on the underlying belief that when supplied with equitable opportunities for academic growth, students will have a broader range of life choices. Each year is important in determining a child’s ultimate success.
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