One message about the new educator evaluation system that comes through loud and clear is that student growth data will be an important measure considered (where available). This school year is a great opportunity to provide more information to staff about MCAS growth data in order to have folks become more comfortable with this measure and what it tells us.
As a reminder, the median student growth percentile for any group is the midpoint of student growth percentiles in the group (which must be >20 students), where half of the students have student growth percentiles higher than the median; half have lower. (It is not appropriate to use the average or “mean” when comparing percentiles.)
Last week, I visited an upper elementary school and presented an overview of the growth model to the staff. After sharing some of the basics, I asked the staff to share with me ways that they would like to look at growth data for their students. Teachers responded that they would like look at median growth for particular groups of students (subgroups, interventions, programs) but also that they wanted to see the median growth for their own classrooms over time. (And yes, I'll be working with the principal to help get this information to the teachers!)
I've been hearing people ask for a while now how they can more easily calculate the median SGP by group, especially by classroom. The Student Growth Roster (G-602) report in the older version of the EDW (2.6) will display a median SGP for a custom roster of students as long as at least 20 students are selected. In the next few weeks I'll be putting together some revised instructions on how to do this (students can be selected using a list, filters, or SASIDs) so stay tuned for more resources on this front!
