When You Examine the Test Scores, Look for the Growth

By: Gary Ritter, Ph.D.

Missouri’s DESE (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) will soon be releasing the Spring 2022 test scores for public schools — traditional and charter — across the state.

These days, when the parents, policymakers, and the public think about what’s going on in schools, we may be thinking of many things beyond test scores. Much of our attention, quite reasonably, has been focused on the mental wellbeing and even the physical safety of our students. Even so, as schools move from the peak of the pandemic into a new normal, we must be very attentive to the progress of our students in making up lost learning from the pandemic in 2020 and 2021.

To gauge the overall scores of students across the state, we might look at the scores on the NAEP. Missouri’s most recent scores indicated a substantial decline in student performance on both math and reading assessments since 2019, with performance lower than the national average. Importantly, we know that these scores do not paint the whole picture of student learning.

At a more fine-grained level, we in the Missouri education community should be paying attention to how much academic growth our students experience during each academic year. Fortunately, policymakers at DESE have developed a reliable measure of student growth—the Missouri Growth Model—and the Department has published these scores for every school across the state each year since 2013.

Essentially, this growth score looks at each individual student and asks the following question: “Compared to students all across Missouri with similar test scores in a given subject in the prior years, how well did a student score this year?”

Students who earn scores higher than most of their peers in their comparison group earn high growth scores, those whose scores are similar to the scores of their peers earn average growth scores, and those whose scores rank in the low end of their comparison peers earn low growth scores.

We at PRiME are convinced that these growth scores are absolutely more important than the subject matter proficiency rates published annually. While point-in-time scores do provide some useful information, they do not tell the full story. Point-in-time proficiency rates ignore where students started when they entered a classroom, and they don’t demonstrate a teacher’s influence on student learning over the school year. While educators in the schools do not influence what students know when students enter a classroom, teachers most certainly can foster student learning in their classroom during the school year.

Thus, clear communication of student growth is vital to understanding the effectiveness of schools and educators; for this reason, the PRiME Center is pleased to release our second round of PRiME Growth Score Reports this month.

So as to communicate the growth scores as clearly as possible, we present the scores on a scale with a mean of 85 and standard deviation of five. The result is a school growth score that looks like scores we are used to seeing in schools: scores in the 90s up to 100 represent high scores and excellent growth, scores in the 80’s represent average growth, and scores below 80 indicate schools are growing their students slowly relative to other schools across the state.

OK … that’s enough of an introduction. Let’s get to the reports! Once again, we will be releasing three reports which dig into the academic growth earned by students from 2019 to 2021 in both math and English Language Arts (ELA). The first report will highlight the top growth score schools across the state, the second (our favorite report) will highlight those schools who serve students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and foster excellent academic growth, and the third report will analyze student growth based on primary instructional mode in fall 2020, highlighting exceptional growth based on differing modalities of instruction.

These reports will be posted on our site on the following dates: