- 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
- 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
Misconception: Teachers of small classes are disadvantaged with PVAAS.
The PVAAS Teacher Value-Added report provides a value-added (or growth) measure as well as a standard error. The standard error provides information about the amount of evidence or data used in the growth measure; the two metrics are used together to assess whether there is significant or moderate evidence that the teacher's group of students met, exceeded, or fell short of the growth standard. The standard error is based on the number of students linked to the teacher as well as the variability in those students' test scores. Although there might be concern that teachers of small classes are disadvantaged by PVAAS, they are actually protected by using a value-added estimate and standard error together.
PVAAS in Theory
Students in all class sizes have the ability to show growth, and the standard error simply provides a confidence band around each estimate. With a smaller amount of data (meaning fewer students), there is less evidence in each estimate, so the standard error tends to be larger than teachers linked to a large number of students. However, although teachers of small classes might have larger standard errors than other teachers, they are also more likely to have a larger gain—either positive or negative. Thus, the two metrics even out, and teachers of small classes are not disadvantaged.
PVAAS in Practice
Actual data may be the most readily apparent way to demonstrate that small classrooms show similar growth as large classrooms. The chart below plots the number of students used in each teacher's PVAAS Value-Added report against the teacher growth index (the value-added estimate divided by its standard error) for PSSA Mathematics in grade 5 in 2019. Each dot represents one teacher, and verified rosters were used where available. The chart demonstrates that teachers serving both small and large numbers of students can show both high and low growth, as measured by PVAAS. Although current state policy requires that teachers are linked to at least 11 individual student scores in order to receive a Teacher report, the chart below shows that even teachers of very small classrooms are not disadvantaged with a sophisticated value-added approach, like PVAAS. In the chart below, the actual correlation between the growth index and number of students is -0.03, which is negligible.
PENNSYLVANIA GROWTH INDEX VERSUS NUMBER OF STUDENTS LINKED TO TEACHER
