Modeling within-person change over time and between-person differences in change over time is a primary goal in prevention science. When modeling change in an observed score over time with multilevel or structural equation modeling approaches, each observed score counts toward the estimation of model parameters equally. However, observed scores…

Longitudinal data analysis has received widespread interest throughout educational, behavioral, and social science research, with latent growth curve modeling currently being one of the most popular methods of analysis. Despite the popularity of latent growth curve modeling, limited attention has been directed toward understanding the issues of…

Student growth percentiles (SGPs) are currently used by several states and school districts to provide information about individual students as well as to evaluate teachers, schools, and school districts. For SGPs to be defensible for these purposes, they should be reliable. In this study, we examine the amount of systematic and random error in…

While states are no longer required to set up teacher evaluation systems based in significant part on student test scores, quite a few continue to use value-added (VAMs) or student growth percentile (SGP) models for that purpose. In this study, we analyzed three years of teacher data to illustrate the performance of teachers' median growth…

The purpose of this report is to investigate the feasibility of constructing a school-level measure of students' academic growth from kindergarten to grade 3, and to assess the validity and precision of that measure. The study measured schoolwide student growth for reading and math using student growth percentiles based on Maryland's 2014/15…

Student learning objectives (SLOs) have become an increasingly popular tool for teacher evaluations as an alternative to Value-added Models (VAMs). However, the use of SLOs faces two major challenges. First, the target setting is mostly subjective and arbitrary. Second, there is little evidence on the reliability and validity of the tool. In this…

Student growth percentiles (SGPs, Betebenner, 2009) are used to locate a student's current score in a conditional distribution based on the student's past scores. Currently, following Betebenner (2009), quantile regression (QR) is most often used operationally to estimate the SGPs. Alternatively, multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) may…

Student Growth Percentiles (SGP, Betebenner, 2009) are used to locate a student's current score in a conditional distribution based on the student's past scores. Currently, following Betebenner (2009), quantile regression is most often used operationally to estimate the SGPs. Alternatively, multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) may also be…

This study, undertaken at the request of the Nevada Department of Education, examined the stability over years of teacher-level growth scores from the Student Growth Percentile (SGP) model, which many states and districts have selected as a measure of effectiveness in their teacher evaluation systems. The authors conducted a generalizability study…