- Using PVAAS for a Purpose
- Key Concepts
- PEERS
- About PEERS
- Understanding the PEERS pages
- Evaluation List
- Evaluation Summary
- Evaluation Forms
- Add Educator
- Add Evaluator
- Manage Access
- Add a school-level Educator to PEERS
- Add a district-level Educator to PEERS
- Add the Evaluator permission to a user's account
- Remove the Evaluator permission from a district user's account
- Add the Evaluator or Administrative Evaluator permission to a district user's account
- Remove the Administrative Evaluator permission from a district user's account
- Remove an Educator from PEERS
- Restore a removed Educator
- Assign an Educator to a district-level Evaluator
- Assign an Educator to an Evaluator
- Unassign an Educator from an Evaluator
- Assign an Educator to a school
- Unassign an Educator from a school
- Link a PVAAS account to an Educator
- Working with Evaluations
- Switch between Educator and Evaluator
- View an evaluation
- Use filters to display only certain evaluations
- Print the Summary section of an evaluation
- Understanding evaluation statuses
- Determine whether other evaluators have access to an evaluation
- Lock or unlock an evaluation
- Save your changes
- Mark an evaluation as Ready for Conference
- Release one or more evaluations
- Download data from released evaluations to XLSX
- Make changes to an evaluation marked Ready for Conference
- Reports
- School Reports
- LEA/District Reports
- Teacher Reports
- Comparison Reports
- Human Capital Retention Dashboard
- Roster Verification (RV)
- Getting Started
- All Actions by Role
- All Actions for Teachers
- All Actions for School Administrators or Roster Approvers
- Manage teachers' access to RV
- Assign other school users the Roster Approver permission
- View a teacher's rosters
- Take control of a teacher's rosters
- Add and remove rosters for a teacher
- Copy a roster
- Apply a percentage of instructional time to every student on a roster
- Batch print overclaimed and underclaimed students
- Remove students from a roster
- Add a student to a roster
- Return a teacher's rosters to the teacher
- Approve a teacher's rosters
- Submit your school's rosters to the district
- All Actions for district admin or district roster approvers
- Assign other LEA/district users the Roster Approver permission
- Take control of a school's rosters
- View a teacher's rosters
- View the history of a teacher's rosters
- Edit a teacher's rosters
- Add and remove rosters for a teacher
- Copy a roster
- Apply a percentage of instructional time to every student on a roster
- Batch print overclaimed and underclaimed students
- Return a school's rosters to the school
- Approve rosters that you have verified
- Submit your district's rosters
- Understanding the RV Pages
- Viewing the History of Actions on Rosters
- Additional Resources
- Admin Help
- General Help
Key Concepts
This section of the online Help contains information about fundamental concepts in the PVAAS reporting. Having a basic understanding of these concepts will enhance your use of the data in the reports.
How PVAAS Measures Growth
Each year, the academic performance of students is evaluated using a variety of assessments. LEAs/Districts, schools, and teachers receive results from these assessments, which provide important information about the achievement level of their students in tested grades and subjects or Keystone content areas. This information includes the number and percentage of students who performed in each of the state's academic performance ranges—Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic. Achievement data from previous years is also included for comparison.
But because the achievement data is based on different groups of students each year, direct comparisons of data across years are often not meaningful or useful. For example, comparing the performance of last year's fifth graders to the performance of this year's fifth graders does not tell us how much academic growth either group of fifth graders made.
We offer a different set of measures. The growth of each group of students is measured as they move from one grade to the next or enter and complete a Keystone course. This approach yields growth measures that are fair, reliable, and useful to educators.
The process begins by generating measures of the average entering achievement level of the group of students served by each teachers, schools, and LEAs/districts. Then a similar measure is generated for the group's average achievement level at the end of the subject and grade or course. To ensure that the measures are precise and reliable, PVAAS incorporates state assessment data across years, grades, and subjects for each student.
The difference between these two achievement measures is calculated and then compared to a standard expectation of growth called the growth standard. Growth color indicators are then assigned to indicate how strong the evidence is that the group of students exceeded, met, or fell short of the growth standard.
Simply put, the expectation is that regardless of their entering achievement levels, students should not lose ground academically, relative to their peers in the same grade and subject or course in the reference group. This standard is reasonable and attainable regardless of the entering achievement of the students served.
With this approach, it's possible for a group of students to demonstrate high growth, even if all of them remain in the same state performance level from one year to the next. Each performance level includes a range of scores, so it's possible for a group's average achievement to rise or fall within a single state academic performance level.