Grades

This paper discusses the search for a “magic metric” in education: an index/number that would be generally accepted as the most efficient descriptor of school’s performance in a district.

The purpose of this paper on value-added research in education is to define this type of research, provide an overview of how it has been conducted, and discuss its benefits and limitations.

Research recognizes the power of assessment to amplify learning and skill acquisition. Assessing students is a fundamental ingredient of effective teaching. It is the tool that enables teachers to measure the extent to which a student or group of students have mastered the material taught in a lesson or a class or during the school year, and it gives instructors the necessary information to modify instruction when progress falters. Assessment affects decisions about grades, placement, advancement, instructional strategies, curriculum, special education placement, and funding. It works to improve instruction in the following ways: (1) as a diagnostic tool, (2) by providing feedback on progress measured against benchmarks, (3) as a motivating factor, and (4) as an accountability instrument for improving systems.

Effective ongoing assessment, referred to in the education literature as formative assessment or progress monitoring, is indispensable in promoting teacher and student success. Feedback through formative assessment is ranked at or near the top of practices known to significantly raise student achievement. For decades, formative assessment has been found to be effective in clinical settings and, more important, in typical classroom settings. Formative assessment produces substantial results at a cost significantly below that of other popular school reform initiatives such as smaller class size, charter schools, accountability, and school vouchers. It also serves as a practical diagnostic tool available to all teachers. A core component of formal and informal assessment procedures, formative assessment allows teachers to quickly determine if individual students are progressing at acceptable rates and provides insight into where and how to modify and adapt lessons, with the goal of making sure that students do not fall behind.

Summative assessment is an appraisal of learning at the end of an instructional unit or at a specific point in time. It compares student knowledge or skills against standards or benchmarks. Summative assessment includes midterm exams, final project, papers, teacher-designed tests, standardized tests, and high-stakes tests. 

This paper discusses the search for a “magic metric” in education: an index/number that would be generally accepted as the most efficient descriptor of school’s performance in a district.

This study examines this question by evaluating the effects of teacher turnover on student achievement under IMPACT, the unique performance-assessment and incentive system in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS).

Grades are ubiquitous in public schools as a measure of student achievement; however, the author in this paper raises questions about the validy of grades as a measure of student achievement.

This study examined students who were first time 9th graders in the 2000-01 school year and follows them through to high school and post-secondary outcomes. The 9th grade suspension data finds that black students, students who are economically disadvantaged, and special education students are disproportionately suspended, both in the frequency of suspensions and the duration of days lost. Disciplinary incidents were found to be interrelated with other of indicators of student disengagement from school, such as course failures and absenteeism

The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of teaching of learning strategies on academic achievement of students. The meta-analysis model was adopted to examine the effectiveness of teaching of learning strategies on academic achievement. According to moderator analyses, it was found that there was no significant difference between effect sizes of the studies in terms of sample size, publication type, course type, implementation duration, instructional level, school setting, and socioeconomic status

Assessing literature that uses either experimental (lottery) or student-level growth-based methods, this analysis infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance.

This NCES study explores public schools' demographic composition, in particular, the proportion of Black students enrolled in schools (also referred to "Black student density" in schools) and its relation to the Black-White achievement gap. This study, the first of it's kind, used the 2011 NAEP grade 8 mathematics assessment data. Among the results highlighted in the report, the study indicates that the achievement gap between Black and White students remains whether schools fall in the highest density category or the lowest density category.

This research aim to find a strong connection between standards-based reform and student outcomes by studied the most recent NAEP data. Their findings believe that states should remain dedicated to standards-based reform. The Common Core is the most recent major policy initiative to advance the broader standards-based reform approach and states should continue their commitment to the Common Core’s full implementation and aligned assessments.

The goal of this paper is to estimate the extent to which there is differential attrition based on teachers' value-added to student achievement.

This paper examines New York City elementary school teachers’ decisions to stay in the same school, transfer to another school in the district, transfer to another district, or leave teaching in New York state during the first five years of their careers.

By estimating the effect of teacher attributes using a value-added model, the analyses in this paper predict that observable qualifications of teachers resulted in average improved achievement for students in the poorest decile of schools of .03 standard deviations.

This paper, prepared as a chapter for the "Handbook of Research on Teaching" (third edition), reviews correlational and experimental research linking teacher behavior to student achievement. It focuses on research done in K-12 classrooms during 1973-83, highlighting several large-scale, programmatic efforts. 

This paper advances the discussion of the achievements differences between the higher and lower social-class groups were increasing, particularly between children in the highest income group and everyone else issue by analyzing trends in the influence of race/ethnicity, social class, and gender on students’ academic performance in the United States. This paper also explores the ways in which English language ability relates to Hispanics’ and Asian Americans’ academic performance over time (Nores and Barnett 2014). 

This paper discusses the search for a “magic metric” in education: an index/number that would be generally accepted as the most efficient descriptor of school’s performance in a district.

This report provides a practical “management guide,” for an evidence-based key indicator data decision system for school districts and schools.

This practice guide provides five recommendations for improving students’ mathematical problem solving in grades 4 through 8. The manual is geared toward teachers, math coaches, other educators, and curriculum developers who want to improve the mathematical problem solving of students.

The Framework for Teaching identifies those aspects of a teacher's responsibilities that have
been documented through empirical studies and theoretical research as promoting
improved student learning.

a mini-series from School Psychology Review about Academic Enablers to Improve Student Performance: Considerations for Research and Practice. 

This research found that by the end of the 2012–2013 school year, TEP’s impacts on student achievement were consistently positive across subjects and cohorts, with especially large effects in math. 

This systematic review synthesizes the findings from 30 studies thatcompared the performance of students at schools using single‐trackyear‐round calendars to the performance of students at schools usinga traditional calendar.

This article describes a school-based randomized trial in over 200 New York City public schools designed to better understand the impact of teacher incentives. 

In the United States, nationally representative data on student achievement come primarily from two sources: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—also known as “The Nation’s Report Card”—and U.S. participation in international assessments, including the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In Summary, this study  this study found many similarities between the two assessments. However, it also found important differences in the relative emphasis across content areas or categories, in the
role of context, in the level of complexity, in the degree of mathematizing, in the overall amount
of text, and in the use of representations in assessments

High-school grades are often viewed as an unreliable criterion for college admissions, owing to differences in grading standards across high schools, while standardized tests are seen as methodologically rigorous, providing a more uniform and valid yardstick for assessing student ability and achievement. The present study challenges that conventional view. The study finds that high-school grade point average (HSGPA) is consistently the best predictor not only of freshman grades in college, the outcome indicator most often employed in predictive-validity studies, but of four-year college outcomes as well.

This study examines that assumption, asking the question:  how well do student grades correlate with test scores, school demographics, student performance on college entrance exams, and the historical difficulty for getting A’s (is it easier or harder to get A’s).  The study found that students who scored higher on end-of-course (EOC) examinations also had higher grades.  However having high grades did not correlate with doing well on the examination.  

This meta-analysis examines 23 studies for student access to curriculum by assessing the gap in reading achievement between general education peers and students with disabilities (SWD). The study finds that SWDs performed more than three years below peers. The study looks at the implications for changing this pictures and why current policies and practices are not achieving the desired results.

TIMSS is designed to align broadly with mathematics and science curricula in the participating countries. This report focuses on the performance of U.S. students relative to that of their peers in other countries in 2007, and on changes in mathematics and science achievement since 1995. This report also describes additional details about the achievement of U.S. student subpopulations. All differences described in this report are statistically significant at the .05 level. No statistical adjustments to account for multiple comparisons were used.

This study examines the implementation of Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) for struggling readers that had been proven to work in early grades. The findings highlight the importance of considering context and implementation, in addition to evidence of effectiveness, when choosing an intervention program. Not only do schools need to adopt programs supported by evidence, but equally educators need to implement them consistently and effectively if students are to truly benefit from an intervention.

This report is the first chapter of the 2018 Brown Center Report on American Education. This section explore trends in math, reading, and civics performance from the late 1990s through the most recent year in which results are available (2017 in math and reading, 2014 in civics). It show trends in nationwide performance and in test score gaps by race (white-black), ethnicity (white-Hispanic), and family income (based on eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch [FRL]). In doing so, this report examine test score trajectories from the beginning to the end of the No Child Left Behind era (NCLB). The 2017 results, in particular, reflect a boundary in the timeline of education policy, demarcating the end of NCLB and the beginning of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

The major objective of this data analysis was to estimate the relationship between variables which can be controlled by public policy and educational output. 

This paper provides direct evidence about the impacts of school job matching on productivity and student achievement.

The authors study the effects of various types of education and training on the ability of teachers to promote student achievement.

This meta-analysis examines issues of reliability and validity of SAT tests and student grades on student performance in college.

In 2017, the percentages of eighth-grade students who performed at or above the Proficient level were higher for several student groups in comparison to 2015. For example, the percentages of Black and Hispanic eighth-grade students who performed at or above the Proficient level on the reading assessment were higher in 2017 compared to 2015. The percentages of students who performed at or above Proficient were also higher for male and female students, students attending public schools, as well as for eighth-graders attending schools in suburban locations. Compared to 2015, there were no significant changes in the percentages of students performing at or above the Basic level for any reported student group.

This Article provide the chart of the percentages of eighth-grade students performing at each of the reading achievement levels in 2017. 

In the last 20 years, international surveys assessing learning in reading, mathematics and science have been headline news because they put countries in rank order according to performance. The three most well known surveys are TIMSS, PISA and PIRLS. The survey offer information about international performances for the use of others in order to drive up education standards everywhere. They also emphasise that their aim is to facilitate dissemination of ideas on which features of education systems lead to the best performances.

This article show evidence of ACT scores drop on 2016. ACT officials attribute the drop to the increasing percentage of high school seniors who have taken the test. Generally, when a larger share of students take a test - in some cases encouraged by state requirements more than the students necessarily being college ready - scores go down.

This study used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, the authors used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms.

The authors use six years of data on student test performance to evaluate the effectiveness of certified, uncertified, and alternatively certified teachers in the New York City public schools. This study also evaluates turnover among teachers with different certification status and the impact on student achievement of hiring teachers with predictably high turnover

his overview looks at the best available evidence on chronic student absenteeism in the context of the scale, the impact, impact multipliers, and interventions. 

This study examines the relationship between two dominant measures of teacher quality, teacher qualification and teacher effectiveness (measured by value-added modeling), in terms of their influence on students’ short-term academic growth and long-term educational success (measured by bachelor’s degree attainment).

Using a randomized control trial in 11 Chinese primary schools, we studied the effects of pay-for-grades programs on academic cheating. We randomly assigned 82 classrooms into treatment or control conditions, and used a statistical algorithm to determine the occurrence of cheating. 

This is the twelfth edition of the Brown Center Report. Part I examines the latest data from state, national, or international assessments. This year the focus is on the latest results from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) released in December, 2012. Part II explores a perennial theme in education studies—the topics that never seem to go away in terms of research and debate. This year it’s on the controversial topics of tracking and ability grouping. Part III is on a prominent policy or program. This year’s analysis is on the national push for eighth graders to take algebra and other high school math courses. 

The College board was recently released SAT scores for the high school graduating class of 2015. Both math and reading scores declined from 2014, continuing a steady downward trend that has been in place for the past decade. Pundits of contrasting political stripes seized on the scores to bolster their political agendas. Petrilli argued that falling SAT scores show that high schools needs more reform. For Burris, the declining scores were evidence of the failure of policies her organization opposes. This articles pointing out that SAT was never meant to measure national achievement and provide detail explanation. 

This monograph attempts to synthesize and interpret the extant research from the last 4 decades on the impact of schooling on students' academic achievement.

this paper investigated the relationship between student and teacher perceptions of the social environments of 19 high school classes and student absenteeism rates and the average final grades given by the teacher. 

This study examines validity data for SAT scores and student grades enrolling classes of 1976 to 1985.

This article describe about the drop down of SAT score in 2016. 

This report examines the educational progress and challenges students face in the United States by race/ethnicity. This report shows that, over time, students in the racial/ethnic groups of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Two or more races have completed high school and continued their education in college in increasing numbers. Despite these gains, the rate of progress has varied among these racial/ethnic groups and differences by race/ethnicity persist in terms of increases in attainment and progress on key indicators of educational performance.

To investigate the relationship between students’ achievement and various contextual factors, NAEP collects information from teachers about their background, education, and training.

How did U.S students perform on ht most recent assessment? 

Nationally representative samples of 209,000 fourth-graders and 175,200 eighth-graders participated in the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in mathematics.

Percentages of students meeting state proficiency standards and performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level, by subject, grade, and state: 2009

In this new national writing assessment sample, 24,100 eighth-graders and 28,100 twelfthgraders engaged with writing tasks and composed their responses on computer. The assessment tasks reflected writing situations common to both academic and workplace settings and asked students to write for several purposes and communicate to different audiences.

This article provide a chart of lists the percentages of fourth-grade students performing at each of the reading achievement levels in 2017.

In 2017, the percentages of fourth-grade students who performed at or above Basic and at or above Proficient in reading were not significantly different for most student groups compared to 2015. In comparison to 2015, the percentages of students who performed at or above the Basic level were lower for students eligible and not eligible for the National School Lunch Program, and for students attending schools in the south region.

This study examines the impact of Charter schools on college enrollment. The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) used college enrollment and completion data for students who (more than a decade ago) entered lotteries to be admitted to 31 charter middle schools across the United States.The results show that admission to a charter middle school did not affect college outcomes. Additionally, the study finds no consistent relationship between the impact a charter middle school achievement and the school’s impact on college outcomes.

With an unprecedented data set, Stanford researchers review more than 200 million test scores to spotlight communities with the nation’s worst academic achievement gaps. The research also revealed that nearly all U.S. school districts with substantial minority populations have large achievement gaps between their white and black and white and Hispanic students.

In this paper, we analyze racial differences in the math section of the general SAT test, using publicly available College Board population data for all of the nearly 1.7 million college-bound seniors in 2015 who took the SAT. The evidence for a stubborn race gap on this test does meanwhile provide a snapshot into the extraordinary magnitude of racial inequality in contemporary American society. Standardized tests are often seen as mechanisms for meritocracy, ensuring fairness in terms of access. But test scores reflect accumulated advantages and disadvantages in each day of life up the one on which the test is taken. Race gaps on the SAT hold up a mirror to racial inequities in society as a whole. Equalizing educational opportunities and human capital acquisition earlier is the only way to ensure fairer outcomes.

This article show the evidence for a race gap on the SAT math score and some big issues at stake including: the value of the SAT itself; the case for broader policies to take into account socioeconomic background in college admissions; the obsession with four-year college degrees; and the danger of college as a “bottleneck” in the American opportunity structure. 

In this research-based book, Roderick examines two critical factors impacting graduation or dropping out. They are school transition to middle school and from there to high school and, secondly, grade retention.

This research considers relationships between student achievement (knowledge and cognitive skill), teacher efficacy (Gibson & Dembo, 1984), and interactions with assigned coaches (self-report measures) in a sample of 18 grade 7 and 8 history teachers in 36 classes implementing a specific innovation with the help of 6 coaches.

In this study the authors evaluate the value of self and peer grading.

This table allows you to compare a student’s SAT® scores with the performance of other 2012 college-bound seniors who took the test some time in high school. Please keep in mind that relationships between test scores and other factors are complex and interdependent. Other factors do not directly affect test performance; rather, they are associated with educational experiences both on tests and in schoolwork.

In this paper, student-level indicators of opportunity to learn (OTL) included in the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment are used to explore the joint relationship of OTL and socioeconomic status (SES) to student mathematics literacy. This paper suggest that in most countries, the organization and policies defining content exposure may exacerbate educational inequalities.

Scores went up in all grades and subjects this year on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). But how much depends on how you look at them. 

The averaged freshman graduation rate provides an estimate of the percentage of students who receive a regular diploma within 4 years of entering ninth grade.

This annual publication is thedefinitive compendium of data on virtually every aspects of education from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. Its chapters include: All Levels of Education, Elementary and Secondary Education, Postsecondary Education, Federal Funds for Education and Related Activities, Outcomes of Education, International Comparisons of Education, and Libraries and Use of Technology. 

This article pointing some findings about achievement gap within school.

Effective ongoing assessment, referred to in the education literature as formative assessment or progress monitoring, is indispensable in promoting teacher and student success. Feedback through formative assessment is ranked at or near the top of practices known to significantly raise student achievement. For decades, formative assessment has been found to be effective in clinical settings and, more important, in typical classroom settings. Formative assessment produces substantial results at a cost significantly below that of other popular school reform initiatives such as smaller class size, charter schools, accountability, and school vouchers. It also serves as a practical diagnostic tool available to all teachers. A core component of formal and informal assessment procedures, formative assessment allows teachers to quickly determine if individual students are progressing at acceptable rates and provides insight into where and how to modify and adapt lessons, with the goal of making sure that students do not fall behind.

Summative assessment is an appraisal of learning at the end of an instructional unit or at a specific point in time. It compares student knowledge or skills against standards or benchmarks. Summative assessment includes midterm exams, final project, papers, teacher-designed tests, standardized tests, and high-stakes tests. 

The purpose of this document is to provide background information that will be useful in interpreting the 2007 results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) by comparing its design, features, framework, and items with those of the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress and another international assessment in which the United States participates, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The report found, because there are differences in the features, frameworks and items of the national and international assessments, direct comparisons among the assessments are not useful. Rather the results from different studies should be thought of as different lenses through which to view and better understand U.S. student performance.

This document provide background information that will be useful in interpreting the results from two key international assessments that are being released in November and December 2007 and in comparing these results with recent findings from the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress in similar subjects. In sum, there appears to be an advantage in capitalizing on the complementary information presented in national and international assessments. NAEP measures in detail the reading, mathematics and science knowledge of U.S. students as a whole, and can also provide trend information for individual states, different geographic regions, and demographic population groups. International assessments like PIRLS and PISA add value by providing a method for comparing our performance in the United States to the performance of students in other nations. However, their differences need to be recognized when interpreting results. 

This article show different approach that researcher took to answer questions on social gradient in education between the countries. Comparing some of these results highlights weak service delivery in many developing countries. Even where resources may be similar, social gradients are steep in some, indicating much worse educational outcomes for the poor. And public resources are often extremely poorly converted into learning. The differential ability of schools and school systems to convert resources into learning outcomes remains a major impediment to improving educational outcomes, and indeed life chances, for the poor.

This report summarizes performance on PIRLS and ePIRLS 2016 from a U.S. perspective. PIRLS results are based on nationally representative samples of fourth-graders. The international data reported for PIRLS 2016 in this report cover 58 countries or other education systems, including the United States.

A 2015 paper by Stuart Yeh offers evidence on how to improve the performance of all students and close the achievement gap between students of different socioeconomic statuses and races. Yeh hypothesizes that the conventional school system is structured in a way that reduces student motivation to succeed. Students become disengaged after experiencing repeated failure, resulting in depressed achievement and grades. This cycle continues to feed on itself as low achievement and poor grades further decrease motivation, engagement, and achievement. Yeh’s research suggests that two critical factors may account for the phenomenon of substandard student achievement: lack of a system for individualizing task difficulty and insufficient rapid performance feedback. These factors appear to be significantly more powerful than sociocultural circumstances (socioeconomic status or race), lack of accountability, lack of choice and competition, and low teacher quality. 

This study investigates the prediction of college success as defined by a student’s college GPA. We predict college GPA mid-way through and at the end of their college careers using high school GPA (HSGPA), college entrance exam scores (SAT/ACT) and an open-ended, performance-based assessment of critical thinking and writing skills (CLA). 3,137 college sophomores and 1,330 college seniors participated in this study.