News
Check out Kingsbury Center Director John Cronin's blog post over on the Huffington Post education page - in the post, John explains why we need to acknolwedge the highest achievers from every school when we are developing policies relating to college access.
NWEA researchers will present several papers at the 2013 meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in San Francisco, CA. The papers cover a range of important adaptive assessment and measurement topics, including propensity item response theory, item parameter estimation, and student effort, among others. The papers will be posted on our Research Reports page soon. Please check out our sessions – here are the times and locations for presentations – here are the times and locations for presentations by Yun Xiang, Shudong Wang, Wei He, John Cronin, Lingling Ma, and Robert Theaker.
Many education research studies are based on a small number of students or schools, out of necessity due to the logistics required to administer tests to students solely for research purposes. A small sample can result in less statistical reliability but that can be improved with larger study and control groups – and NWEA's Growth Research Database (GRD) can help with this. The GRD contains not only achievement data for millions of students, but demographic information such as ethnicity, gender, and date of birth, and school data such as urban/rural location, size, and socioeconomic factors. By tracking the growth of students over many years, on the same scale across grades and states, researchers can identify trends and patterns at student, classroom, district, regional, or other programmatic levels.
High-achieving students show nearly equivalent rates of academic growth toward college readiness, whether they go to a low- or high-poverty schools, according to a study by Kingsbury Center researchers.
A Level Playing Field: How College Readiness Standards Change the Accountability Game found that average rates of academic growth by high achievers in high-income and low-income schools were nearly equivalent. High achievers in high-income schools showed slightly more significant math achievement growth than high achievers in low-income schools, while those in low-income schools showed slightly larger growth rates in reading achievement.
Anna J. Egalite and Brian Kisida from the University of Arkansas received a data award from the Kingsbury Center to look at student achievement impacts related to school size, and conclude that school size has a meaningful impact on student achievement.
As Kingsbury Center researcher Nate Blog wrote in his recent blog post, tests are no longer used just for evaluating students – their results are now considered in the evaluation of schools, teachers, programs, and more.
Kingsbury Center Director John Cronin will demonstrate how student growth data can improve the evaluation of your academic programs in this easy-to-access webinar from NWEA.
John Cronin and Mike Dahlin have authored an article on the advantages and pitfalls associated with the use of various metrics to measure educational performance. The article is featured in the Fall 2012 edition of INSIGHT, the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA) Professional Journal.
NWEA researchers are pleased to announce our recent partnership with the National Center on Assessment and Accountability for Special Education (NCAASE) at the University of Oregon. NCAASE conducts research on the developmental progress in achievement of Students with Disabilities (SWDs) and the validity of alternative accountability models where student academic growth is used to describe and evaluate school effectiveness. The research program, funded by Institute of Educational Sciences (IES), focuses on reading and mathematics achievement growth based on NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), longitudinal state testing, and Curriculum-Based Measurement (easyCBM) data for students with and without disabilities from North Carolina, Arizona, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.
Congratulations to the newest Ph.D. in the Kingsbury Center – Dr. Nate Jensen! Dr. Jensen, a Research Specialist at the Center, was recently awarded his doctoral degree in Counselor Education from the University of Arkansas.
The Kingsbury Center is accepting applications for Data Awards! Data awards are designed to help graduate students and university researchers without project funding use our Growth Research Database (GRD) to further their research goals and projects.
NWEA researchers presented several papers and a poster session at the 2012 meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Jeff Marshall and Bob Horton from Clemson University’s Inquiry in Motion Institute are working with the Kingsbury Center on the evaluation component of a multi-year study examining the student learning impact of a Professional Development (PD) program for math and science teachers.