Background:

K-12 Data Governance Group.

The K-12 Data Governance Group (DGG), within the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), was established to assist in the design and implementation of a K-12 Education Data Improvement System for financial, student, and educator data. The objective of the system is to monitor student progress, have information on the quality of the educator workforce, monitor and analyze the costs of programs, provide for financial integrity and accountability, and have the capability to link across these various data components by student, by class, by teacher, by school, by district, and statewide. The DGG includes representatives of various educational agencies such as, the Education Data and Research Center and the Legislative Evaluation and Accountability Program Committee, and is independently reviewed by the latter two groups.

The DGG has multiple responsibilities, including:

identifying reports that should be made available on the Internet;
ensuring that data systems are flexible and able to adapt to evolving needs for information; and
establishing minimum standards for data systems.

The OSPI is also required to make certain reports available on the Internet. All DGG and OSPI reports required under the DGG statute must contain data to the extent it is available and must include documentation of which data are not available or are estimated.

Norm-Referenced Results.

Students' individual standardized assessment results are 'criterion referenced.' This means that each result represents a comparison against some specific criterion, such as an accepted definition of grade-level proficiency in an academic subject.

When students' assessment results are evaluated based on where they fall within the distribution of results from a larger group, the results are 'norm-referenced.' This means that each result is compared to some 'normal' expectation of a group of results. The larger group of results, referred to as the 'norm group,' may include the results of all the students in the state that took the assessment, all the students in a district, or all the students in a school. The norm group may also be refined to evaluate the results of a subgroup of students, such as a students of a particular race or ethnicity, or students participating in a particular program. In addition to norm-referencing the results of students' individual scores, it is possible to norm-reference, or compare, the average standardized assessment results of the entire school to a norm group, such as the district or the state.

Student Growth Percentile.

In March 2013, the OSPI introduced a method of measuring student academic growth, called the Student Growth Percentile (SGP) because the OSPI could not measure the absolute growth of a student from one year to the next. Once the Smarter Balanced Assessments are fully implemented, the OSPI will be able to measure absolute growth; however, it will continue to use the SGP. The SGP is a method of norm-referencing, which describes student growth compared to other students with similar prior test scores, a student's academic peers.

The SGP allows comparison of students who enter school at different levels and shows student growth and academic progress, even for students who are not meeting the state standard on assessments. The SGP is a number between 1 and 99. If a student has a SGP of 85, it means the student showed more growth than 85 percent of his or her academic peers. A student with a low score on a state assessment can show high growth and vice versa. Similarly, two students with very different assessment scale scores can have the same SGP.