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REL Northwest, a project of Education Northwest, hosted a workshop highlighting how inappropriate use of proficiency rates to index student achievement gaps, trends, or gap trends can lead to inaccurate inferences. The goal of the event was to improve use of assessment data to guide instructional practice, an issue consistently identified by Northwest Region educators as critical.

This event was held in conjunction with the Focus on Assessment Institute sponsored by the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators.

Overview

In this age of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), student proficiency rates are widely reported and drive a great deal of the conversation about school quality. Proficiency rates are the percentage of students in a school, district, or state who earn test scores that are above a certain "cut score" or threshold on an exam. NCLB and most state systems require reporting of proficiency rates for all students together, as well as separate proficiency rates for many different subgroups of students. NCLB explicitly targets the reduction of performance gaps between groups of students, and ties many processes and consequences to progress that must lead to perfect performance on overall and subgroup proficiency rates.

Given the high stakes embodied in this system, it is important to understand that proficiency rates by their very nature offer a skewed and often misleading picture of educational improvement over time, and are especially problematic as indicators of progress toward equity in educational opportunity. Dr. Andrew Ho, a professor at the University of Iowa, presents research illuminating how the inappropriate use of proficiency rates to measure achievement gaps, trends in student achievement over time, or especially changes over time in achievement gaps can lead to misunderstanding student achievement data. Ho argues that rather than using proficiency rates, plotting averages of test scores or changes over time at certain percentiles will foster a more complete understanding of student achievement trends and gaps.

About the Facilitator

Dr. Andrew Ho is currently an assistant professor of measurement and statistics at the Harvard School of Education. He holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology and an M.S. in statistics from Stanford University. Ho recently received the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) 2010 Jason Millman Promising Measurement Scholar Award. The award recognizes an early career scholar whose research makes a major contribution to the field.