Data services provide governance, organization, and maintenance that make raw, structured and unstructured data useful to applications and accessible by users. They are often deployed as an integral component of big data strategies to help make sense of massive collections of structured and semi-structured data stored in storage volumes. For example, they can help manage customer records from online transactional processing (OLTP) databases, property damage information from data warehouses, and images or videos stored in data lakes.
Using longitudinal student assessment data, educators can calculate growth percentiles to reveal insights about students’ relative performance against their academic peers. These percentiles can be used by both teachers and parents to better understand a student’s progress, while also allowing for comparisons across classrooms, schools, and states.
Student Growth Plots (SGP) are calculated from a student’s longitudinal assessment history by comparing their current assessment score with scale scores from a prior year’s test data. A baseline SGP can be generated from a single student’s prior years of test scores, or a cohort SGP can be created from the same set of students as a previous cohort of SGPs. While both types of SGPs can be used to measure a student’s progress, creating cohort-referenced SGPs requires a longer amount of time and more stable assessments than baseline-referenced SGPs.
Baseline-referenced SGPs may also be more susceptible to spurious correlations with other variables, such as teacher or school characteristics or design of the baseline cohort. Furthermore, the need for at least three years of stable assessment data makes baseline-referenced SGPs less suitable for educator evaluation systems, as some teachers will be evaluated solely on their current year’s growth without regard to whether they have met a passing growth standard established in the previous year.
While SGPs are an effective tool for measuring student progress, they cannot tell us which students will pass a particular exam or course. Therefore, it is important to use a variety of measures to assess a student’s learning. These additional measures should include classroom observations, student interviews, and performance assessments.
SGPs are a powerful and valuable tool for both teachers and parents. They can reveal insightful information about a student’s progress and performance in relation to their academic peers, which can then be used to develop plans for improvement. By using SGPs, both teachers and parents can get a clearer picture of their students’ progress over time and better understand the steps needed to reach their goals. SGPs can also be used to inform educational reforms and policies. The information provided by these tools can be used to help students improve their academic performance, as well as guide the development of new curriculum and instructional practices. Using these tools will help ensure that all students receive the education they deserve. SGPs can be implemented at any grade level and in any subject area. The key is to start early and continue implementing these tools throughout the school year.