Trend-Flipping, Gap-Bowing and Growth-Stretching: The Pliability of Popular High-Stakes Statistics

The most important large-scale policy questions in education - Are students learning? Are gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students decreasing? - are answered in part by test score trends. These trends can be reported in different ways. One popular approach is to look at the change in the percent of proficient students, where "proficient" is defined as scoring above a chosen cut score.

In an clear, lively presentation, Professor Andrew Ho describes how misleading these trend statistics can be - they can be larger, smaller, and even undergo sign-reversal under a different choice of cut score. He explains the basis for this "pliability," and describes alternative approaches to reporting and comparing score trends that avoid the troublesome properties of the proficiency-based reporting that has become widespread under No Child Left Behind.

Presented by

Andrew Ho
Assistant Professor, Measurement and Statistics, Psychological and Quantitative Foundation

For more information contact Andrew Ho at andrew-ho@uiowa.edu