Districts pilot value-added assessment: leaders in Ohio and Pennsylvania are making better sense of their school data

School Administrator, Dec, 2004 by Brett Schaeffer

Like a lot of superintendents, Pennsylvania's Steve Iovino believes in a simple axiom: the more student test data the better.

Warwick School District, a 4,100-student district located in southeastern Pennsylvania, tested its students even in years when state-mandated exams were not required.

But Iovino didn't know exactly what to make of all this test data his district was accumulating.

"We weren't doing much with longitudinal data," he says. In other words, the Warwick schools weren't tracking individual student achievement over time, but rather looking at how a particular grade scored on a test year after year--a snapshot assessment.

Iovino knew there were other ways of looking at his district's yearly test data. "A way that would predict how well a student would perform [in the future] and what kind of value was added to a student's achievement in a given year," he says.

He was right. Pennsylvania launched in 2002 the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System with Warwick as one of the 32 pilot districts. The system is based on the value-added assessment model statistician William Sanders created in Tennessee in the 1980s.

As Iovino explains, value-added assessment carries two basic goals: to assess how much growth a student achieved from the beginning of the school year to the end and to predict a student's future growth. Value-added requires, though, a minimum of three consecutive years' worth of test data for an accurate assessment. When Sanders created the model few school districts in the country conducted annual testing.

But with the No Child Left Behind Act's yearly testing requirements, every school district in the country soon will have enough test data to use value-added assessment. Sanders and others hope they do.

Teacher Usage

"It took us a long time in education to realize we could do more with test scores than simply slice and average them," says June Rivers, who co-directs with Sanders, her husband, the Value-Added Assessment and Research Program at the SAS Institute in Cary, N.C. Rivers is working with officials in Pennsylvania to implement that state's value-added assessment system known as PVAAS.

In 2002 the state added a value-added component to its student assessment process and launched a pilot project with 32 districts that had been using yearly tests in grades three through eight. Last year, 30 more districts were added to the pilot and this year an additional 50 to 60 districts are participating, according to Kristin Lewald, a project manager for PVAAS, which is overseen by the state's department of education.

It's her job to work with superintendents such as Iovino to smooth the transition.

"What I tell them is that it's taking information they already have and using it in a different way. We use data they already have, without using another test," she says.

In Warwick, Iovino began the value-added assessment project by looking at his middle school students. "The plan was to take a look at total scores as well as student grouping," he says.

Iovino's teachers have used the value-added measures that allow a teacher to know in more detail where individual students stand academically and to regroup students before beginning a new curriculum topic. Iovino, in his explanation, cites a social studies unit on feudalism. "Let's say we have a group of 7th-grade students who aren't reading at grade level. That group receives a pre-teaching lesson before getting into the study of feudalism."

Warwick this year will begin value-added assessment at its four elementary schools. "I want to create a climate where this is something worth looking at and where we are developing future action for improvement," he says.

A Full Spectrum

An important aspect of value-added, according to both Lewald and Sanders, is that the information allows school officials to examine the progress of all students, not merely the students who are struggling. States have to go beyond the minimal NCLB requirements to ensure all students are making progress every year, Sanders says.

"What about kids from the other end of the spectrum? Kids not in jeopardy of falling behind?" Sanders asks rhetorically. "The next question is, 'Can we sustain that kid on [an upward] trajectory to get that kid in a position to go to a university and be successful?' We want sustained growth for all kids, not just the low-end students."

The Oak Hills School District in suburban Cincinnati is well aware of Sanders' views that challenge most state accountability tests that only show when kids are proficient.

"One of the things we're able to do with value-added is highlight areas where we're doing things really well," says Jay Kemen, Oak Hills' director of curriculum and instruction. The information is personalized and detailed at the student level, the grade level and the building level.

"Where we have very high performance based on growth, we can go in and say, 'What are you doing well?' It works in districts and schools that have developed a culture of learning," he says. "I think in part what this data and other sources give us is a broader picture."