(The Center Square) – When looking for alternative assessments to standardized testing, it might be best to start with GPA, according to a recent report from an education policy group.
But that should only be the starting point – it’s the when and where to measure GPA that could round out school quality evaluations, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which advocates for educational excellence and charter schools. Measuring schools’ effect on students’ GPAs after they leave could be a form of assessment that is valid, reliable, timely, fair and trustworthy, the Institute writes, and avoids incentivizing lowering standards to inflate student performance. GPA growth and test-based growth together could provide a fuller picture of school performance.
In its study, the Institute looked at “nearly a decade of student-level data” from some Maryland and North Carolina schools. It tracked students’ GPA growth from elementary school into their first year of middle school and from middle school into their first year of high school to assess the schools they were transitioning from.
The study found that both elementary and middle schools “have sizable effects on the grades that students earn at their next schools.”
“For example, attending a middle school with strong ‘GPA growth’ was associated with a 0.1 standard deviation increase in a North Carolina student’s ninth grade GPA and a 0.06 standard deviation increase in a Maryland student’s ninth grade GPA – or about 0.1 grade points,” according to the report.
It also found that GPA-based growth was “about as reliable as test-based growth” but that there was only a weak correlation between improvement in GPA and improvement in test scores – demonstrating that they measure different things.
Though the Institute noted three potential negatives to the method, including that it might be “incompatible with a strict reading of ESSA,” it argued that it was worth exploring.
“At the end of the day, it sends a clear message to schools that one of their core missions is to help their graduates succeed in their next step – not just in reading and math, but in all subjects – and not just on tests, but on the stuff that tests struggle to capture,” according to the report.
