Determining True Progress When Cut Scores Change: A Thoughtful Tool from the Field for Elementary and Middle School Leaders

Joe Schroeder, Ph.D., Associate Executive Director, AWSA

This year’s transition to new performance standards (i.e., cut scores) for the Forward Exam’s ELA and mathematics assessments (for grade 3-8 students) presents challenges in processing student outcomes relative to previous years.  Therefore, this is a common question I am currently hearing from elementary school and middle school principals:  “Is an increase in our students’ ELA and/or math scores on the most recent Forward exam (A) related to the change in cut scores or (B) an example of actual performance improvement?  Sauk Prairie Middle School Principal, Tricia Rodey, enlisted a thoughtful approach to answer this question, which, with her permission, I am happy to share and highlight in this short article.  I hope that her approach can help you answer this important learning leadership question in your school, too.

Tricia and the Sauk Prairie Middle School team have been deeply engaged in a continuous improvement journey for years, with good reason to believe that this was the year when they were going to see big improvement in student outcomes.  But how does one credibly compare growth from year to year when cut scores starkly change?  In other words, is there a way to “compare apples to apples” in such analysis?  Tricia’s approach:  determine the difference in local ELA/math scores to the state average score for a given year; then show that difference over many years in order to discern the level of real performance improvement over time.  Through this method, Tricia kept a reference point for comparison (the state average) relatively the same over many years even though the cut scores changed significantly for this past year.

So with that background in mind, please see this spreadsheet that Tricia created (solely with data available through WISEdash) to credibly assess growth within her school’s Forward results.  This spreadsheet demonstrates that there was indeed significant actual performance improvement at Sauk Prairie Middle School this past year in both ELA and mathematics across an array of subgroups.  In particular, see the “Net Change in Difference” column that supports such an interpretation of the findings.