Fall to spring or fall to fall as a measure of progress?

By mrjgeckos on February 29, 2012

What are your thoughts out there in terms of juding growth? My former school district used to measure yearly growth by examining fall to fall scores. I believe this is absurd because I along with my students, am being judged for an amount of time (the summer) in which I had no control of external influences of knowledge retention. The reasoning we were given was, "If you've instructed the students using the best practices, they'll retain the information." For a incentive based pay program, I also thought this line of though was way out of line. 

Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but I feel it makes the most sense to examine fall to spring growth. 

What are your thoughts?

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Teresa Schnoor's picture

By Teresa Schnoor on Tue, 10/23/2012 - 5:43am
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We should use spring to spring to measure progress. Even fall to spring is an issue because fall testing measures summer months for which we've provided no instruction. Spring to spring measures the culmination of one year's instruction to the culmination of the next.

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