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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.

Ho presented his research at a daylong workshop sponsored by REL Northwest (operated by Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory), the Washington Educational Research Association (WERA), and the Institute of Education Sciences. The session was a pre-conference offering at WERAis annual meeting.

Presenter

Dr. Andrew Ho is currently an assistant professor of measurement and statistics at the University of Iowa. He will be assuming the position of assistant professor at the Harvard School of Education. He holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology and an M.S. in statistics from Stanford University. His early work was honored with dissertation awards from the American Educational Research Association, the National Council on Measurement in Education, and The Spencer Foundation. He has won the Stanford University Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching. Ho's current work, exploring interactions between educational statistics and educational policies, is funded by grants from The Spencer Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences.