JOB TALK: Educational Measurement and Assessment

Job Talk - PLEASE NOTE THE TIME!

How do Student “Growth” Percentiles Measure Up?

Recent educational policies have expanded the focus of accountability measures from student proficiency at a single time point to student score histories over time to measure “growth” in educational achievement. The term “growth” is widely used to describe various concepts, metrics, and models. This seminar emphasizes distinctions among types of “growth” interpretations and models. Specifically, it focuses on “conditional status” metrics, which describe the status of students in terms of empirical expectations given past scores. This class of metrics includes the widely used nonlinear, quantile-regression based Student Growth Percentile (SGP) model. SGPs and a simpler, linear (conditional mean) regression approach are compared and evaluated in terms of their recovery of benchmark percentile ranks and variability under scale transformations. Similarly, aggregates of SGPs for students within groups (e.g., classrooms, schools, and districts) are examined and located in a class of “Aggregate-Level Conditional Status Metrics.” The results have implications for classifications of students and groups while also emphasizing the importance of disentangling ambiguities associated with buzzwords like “growth” and “value-added.”