Research Reports & Publications

As more schools are held accountable for current state educational accountability systems, many criticisms have been leveled at the inadequacy and inconsistency of status-based measures. This study helps to view school effectiveness as a measurement of growth instead of simple decisions regarding passing or failing at one-time point or even multi-time points. To further address the assertion that schools with a large proportion of academically disadvantaged students are usually evaluated and judged unfairly, this study takes into account school context and develops conditional school growth to make the “apples to apples” comparison possible.

John Cronin's presentation for Kentucky MAP Insitute on June 22, 2010.

John Cronin's presentation for Kentucky MAP Insitute on June 22, 2010. 

Researchers from the Kingsbury Center presented papers at several sessions of the joint annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) on April 29 - May 4, 2010.

 To learn more about our presentations and sessions, click here.

Presentation materials for Yun Xiang and Carl Hauser's presentation at the 2010 AERA Meeting.  This topic of this presentation is "Growth Model: A Panacea for the School Accountability System?" and covers questions such as: What is growth? Does growth modeling give adequate consideration to variability of student achievement? Do high-performing and low-performing students grow in the same fashion? If not, what are the implications for school evaluations?  Is growth a rigid reflection of school effectiveness?

The case studies in this series document long-term partnerships between NWEA and several public and charter school systems that
have resulted in compelling evidence of improved student achievement. The subject of this case study is the Anoka-Hennepin
School District, a large suburban school system of about 38,000 students located inside the Minneapolis/St. Paul metroplex.

The subject of this case study is National Heritage Academies (NHA), a charter school management organization that operates over 60 charter schools in six states.  NHA schools operate in a very diverse set of communities; high poverty urban centers such as New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit as well as schools in mid-size and smaller cities including Toledo, Ohio and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The case studies in this series document long-term partnerships between NWEA and several public and charter school systems that have resulted in compelling evidence of improved student achievement.  The subject of this case study is Spartanburg 4, a small school district located on the fringes of Spartanburg, South Carolina.

The subject of this case study is the Clover Park School District, a large suburban school system located near Tacoma, Washington.  The district serves an ethnically diverse student population, and approximately 30% of the students reside on the Fort Lewis Military Base, which is located inside district boundaries.  About 11,600 students attend school in the district, and approximately 67% of them are eligible for free and/or reduced lunch.

Randomized controlled experiments are difficult to implement in a school setting. While it is feasible to randomly assign patients to treatment conditions in some medical trials, this same practice can frequently be problematic when applied in school settings.  Virtual Comparison Groups (VCG) were developed as an alternative quasi-experimental design for social science researchers working in the field of education.  A VCG is a group of students who are matched, based on key characteristics of the student and school, to a single student who is part of a study group.  This paper, presented at the 2010 AERA Annual Meeting, examines how the treatment of students who do not have a sufficient number of matches with the application of the strictest VCG criteria affects the overall school evaluation. After the initial selection criteria have been applied, not all students will have VCGs that contain at least 51 students, and current practice is to relax the selection criteria until there are at least 51 students in the VCG group. What we do not know is how this relaxing affects the VCG estimates and consequently any evaluations that may be conducted. We also do not know if the procedure for relaxing the comparison group requirements for a Virtual Comparison Group introduces an unintended bias into the VCG’s growth estimates. To answer the research questions, we will examine how these treatments affect the VCG’s growth estimates.