Chapter 9: The Effective Use of Student and School Descriptive Indicators of Learning Progress: From the Conditional Growth Index to the Learning Productivity Measurement System

This chapter seeks to clarify several issues concerning the measurement of achievement and growth in education through two examples. Specifically, we begin with an unabashedly oversimplied history of recent research in measurement and evaluation as a way of engaging the thorny issues surrounding the measurement of achievement and growth. Two illustrations drawn from the author’s work on Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, assessment follow.

In the first example, we describe the conditional growth index (CGI), a measure of learning gain that was recently introduced in an effort to furnish student achievement and growth norms for MAP assessments. In the second example, we illustrate the use of the CGI in NWEA’s Learning Productivity Measurement (LPM) system, a procedure for delivering a set of school-level indicators that offers multiple perspectives into the learning productivity occurring at a school. We argue that with the right achievement scale, suitable data, and when appropriately designed, descriptive indicators of student or school performance can provide support to everyday instruction decisions and inform school improvement. A discussion, to include a brief summary of the main points made in the paper, follows.