- 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
- Building Reports
- LEA/District Reports
- Classroom Reports
- Student 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
Growth Standard Methodology
Before analyzing the data, all students' scores are converted to normal curve equivalents, or NCEs. NCEs are similar to percentiles in that they represent where a score falls in a distribution. The NCEs for assessments analyzed with the growth standard methodology indicate where each score falls in the distribution of all students in the reference group in that grade and subject.
This conversion to NCEs ensures that all assessment scores are on a common scale across years, grades, and subjects. This step is necessary to generate reliable measures of Growth. Converting to NCEs puts the scores on a common scale, but it does not affect how many LEAs/districts, schools, or teachers fall into each growth color indicator range.
With that in mind, NCEs are easy to interpret. The center of the distribution, or reference group average, is 50. Values below 50 indicate that the students' average achievement level is below the reference group average. Likewise, values above 50 indicate that students' average achievement level is higher than the reference group average. NCEs can range below 0 and above 100 to preserve the equal-interval property of the distribution and to avoid truncating the test scale.
To estimate the average achievement of a group of students, PVAAS does not simply average the students' assessment scores in the selected subject and grade. Instead, it uses all scores across years, grades, and subjects. Using this much data helps to minimize the impact of measurement error associated with any individual test score. It also allows all students to be included, even those with incomplete testing histories. The resulting estimates of each group's average achievement are more precise and reliable, and they better reflect the group of students served, despite missing test scores or high mobility.
Using this approach, PVAAS estimates the average entering achievement of a district's, school's, or teacher's students for each tested subject and grade. Then the students' average achievement in that subject at the end of the year is calculated. Finally, the two achievement estimates are compared to see if the group's average achievement increased, decreased, or remained about the same relative to the reference group distribution.
The growth standard is simply the expectation that, regardless of their entering achievement level, students should make enough Growth during the school year to at least maintain that achievement level relative to their peers in the same grade and subject. This is a reasonable and attainable expectation of Growth. For example, if a high-achieving group of students starts the year at the 70th NCE and ends the year at the 70th NCE, then they met the standard, because they maintained their achievement level. Likewise, a low-achieving group of students that started the year at the 30th NCE and ended the year at the 30th NCE also met the standard. In both examples, the Value-Added report would display a growth measure of 0.0.
Remember, the growth measures are reported in reference group NCEs. Positive values suggest an increase in the group's average achievement relative to their peersin the reference group, while negative values suggest a decrease in the group's achievement. However, because the growth measures are estimates, consider their associated standard errors as you interpret the values.