Measuring Student Growth

During its January Work Session, the Gilmer County School Board heard a presentation on our schools’ focus on Student Growth and its effect on the County’s CCRPI (College and Career Readiness Performance Index) Score.

Student Growth is being measured by the school system and State Board of Education as a part of CCRPI through Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs). The new form allows another look at students through a “growth vs. performance” measurement.

As opposed to simply focusing on the proficiency of students, these new SGPs will track a students progress from year to year as they score. According to the Board’s presentation, “Much like achievement levels are used to
describe student performance on state assessments, student growth levels provide context for various values of SGPs.” This means there are three levels to a student’s SGP score.

They are described as:

Low – (1-34) Struggles to maintain his/her current level of achievement.

Typical – (35-65) Generally will maintain or improve academically.

High – (66-99) Generally will make greater improvements academically.

These scores allow the Board of Education to map out its students as a whole for quick and easy comparisons to other counties, comparisons of schools within the county, as well as individually identifying students. Utilizing  a chart in quadrants scaled again the student’s achievement, individual students can identify as high achieving with low growth, low achievement with high growth, low achievement and low growth, and high achievement and high growth.

According to Superintendent Dr. Shanna Wilkes, this individual measurement could help identify students who may achieve high but show low growth indicating they may not be challenged enough and should move to more challenging classes. Likewise, it seems the chart will also identify students who may need extra attention or simply may not be grasping concepts in their lessons.

Through the SGP tracking, the schools will collect both fall and winter scores to provide feedback on the schools more often and aid in setting plans for a class’ future as well as project estimations for teachers for the Georgia Milestones testing and ACT scores.

Check out more by looking into the information provided during the presentation here.