JOB TALK: Dr. Katherine Castellano
Framing Student Growth Percentiles in the Bigger Measurement Picture
Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) have widespread appeal for several uses at the student and aggregate level from measuring individual student growth to evaluating educator/leader effectiveness. Such high-stakes uses require substantiation with validity evidence. This seminar emphasizes that the same educational measurement validity and fairness considerations we apply to educational assessments and their corresponding test scores apply to "growth" measures like SGPs. These considerations include reflections on the construct, scores, reliability/precision, score use, fairness and implications. In discussing each of these considerations, I present findings from several of my research studies.
Katherine Furgol Castellano is a psychometrician whose research primarily involves investigating measurement and statistical models in rigorous and innovative ways to inform educational practices and reform. Dr. Castellano earned her doctorate in Educational Measurement and Statistics and her Masters in Statistics from the University of Iowa. Currently, she is an Associate Psychometrician at Educational Testing Service, working on several projects related to the development and scoring of innovative, “next generation” assessments, including virtual science labs and games-based assessments, as well as continuing her research on the increasingly popular Student Growth Percentile metric. Previously, she was an Institute of Education Sciences postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing multilevel model and educational measurement research projects with Mark Wilson and Sophia Rabe-Hesketh. Dr. Castellano has also been an Adjunct Instructor at Saint Louis University. Committed to making research accessible to practitioners, she is lead author of A Practitioner’s Guide to Growth Models, commissioned by the Council of Chief State School Officers. As an avid proponent of the effective use of graphical displays, she also enjoys serving as the Visuals Editor for Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice.
