Scores released to public for 1st time
Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster New Era
Updated Mar 06, 2011 22:08
By BRIAN WALLACE, Staff Writer
Think of PVAAS as an academic growth chart for a child.
The Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment System measures a student's growth over time, based on how he or she scored on past PSSA tests going back to grade three.
Based on that track record, it estimates how that student will perform the next time he or she takes the PSSAs.
Those new PSSA scores are compared with the projections to determine how well a school did in advancing that pupil academically in one year's time.
Unlike the Pennsylvania System of School Assessments tests administered each year, PVAAS measures growth, not achievement.
PVAAS was piloted in Pennsylvania beginning in 2002. Since 2008, PVAAS data has been available for all public schools administering PSSAs in math, reading, science and writing.
Until now, the results were shared only with school districts, which have used the data to fine-tune their curricula and teacher training and to identify students in need of remediation or enrichment.
The system can provide information for individual students or groups broken down by ethnicity, class, gender or any number of categories.
In response to a 2010 legislative mandate, PVAAS results were released to the public for the first time this year. The public data, available on the website pvaas.sas.com, is much more limited than what is provided to schools.
The site lists PVAAS reports for schools enrolling students in grades four through eight and 11, but it doesn't include data on elementary schools that enroll students only through grade four.
Because of that, reports are not provided for several Lancaster County grade schools.
PVAAS assigns an "average growth index" to each district and school that represents how well it did, overall, in achieving a year's worth of academic growth for all students in 2010, along with a three-year average.
The number is a statistical tool that can be used for comparison purposes. The bigger the number, the better. In general, numbers larger than zero represent at least a year's worth of academic growth, and negative numbers represent less than a year's worth of growth.
The ratings are color-coded to reflect how well a school performed. Green is "favorable," yellow is "caution," pink is "concern" and red is "strong concern."
While the reports cannot be broken down by grade or groups of students, they can be compared with the results of other schools in the same district, county or statewide.
Comparisons also can be made among schools with similar demographics.
State officials caution that PVAAS ratings are only one measure of a school's performance and should be viewed in conjunction with PSSA results, graduation and dropout rates and other academic measures in assessing how schools perform.
bwallace@lnpnews.com
Read more: http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/359705#ixzz1G3mcCaV8
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