Student proficiency percentages are everywhere. They headline newspaper articles; anchor school, district, and state report cards; drive policy research; and facilitate high-stakes interpretations of school and state educational progress. The problem is they can be misleading.

An August 12 event in Eugene, Oregon, aims to change the way people think about the reporting of student achievement, especially about our most important large-scale inferences—educational improvement over time (trends) and progress toward equity in educational opportunity (gap trends).

This REL Northwest Bridge Event features the work of Harvard University’s Dr. Andrew Ho. Using timely and relevant examples from Northwest states, Ho will explain why proficiency rates yield limited and unrepresentative depictions of how scores vary between groups and change over time. Simple remedies for correcting these analyses—whether working from original data or performing secondary analyses from existing reports—will be presented.

Ho’s research explores interactions between educational statistics and educational policies, including the consequences of proficiency-based accountability metrics, the validation of high-stakes test score trends with low-stakes comparisons, and the potential for alternative accountability structures such as “growth models” and “index systems” to improve school and classroom incentives.

The event is free and will be held in conjunction with the Focus on Assessment Institute sponsored by the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators (COSA). The first hour of the presentation will serve as a keynote address to all attendees of the COSA institute. After the keynote, Dr. Ho will facilitate a workshop for a limited number of participants. Researchers, evaluators, and analysts who work for and with state education agencies (SEAs) and local education agencies (LEAs) in the Northwest are encouraged to attend.
Visit the event page to learn more and register.