When Data-Driven Instruction Works: A Case Study in the Nation’s Capital
By Tran Le and Amber Northern
In recent decades, a greater focus on standardized testing and high stakes accountability measures have spawned an unprecedented amount of student assessment data. Studying these data in schools is common practice for teachers, since presumably it results in identification of students’ academic strengths and weaknesses, paving the way for tailoring and adjustment of curriculum and instruction that will ultimately improve student achievement. But are these data-informed practices actually playing out as intended in classrooms?
In a recent Education Week article, well-known Professor of Education Heather Hill of Harvard University says, “no.” Dr. Hill summarizes extant, rigorous research over the last twenty years on the effects of analyzing student assessment data and finds that doing so does not change educator practice or student outcomes. More specifically, teachers don’t use student test-score data to “deepen their understanding of how students learn, to think about what drives student misconceptions, or to modify instructional techniques.”¹ Simply put, “Focusing on the problem has likely distracted us from focusing on the solution.”
That’s tough medicine for the thousands of school districts that have no doubt offered countless professional development hours on how to practice “data-driven instruction.”
A quick Google search produces over 94 million results with the phrase. Everyone from school districts to education advocacy organizations to teachers, principals, and professors has something to say about the topic. The popular site for educator resources, ASCD, has for sale nearly 1,500 books about data-driven practices. Clearly, the idea has gained traction in American schools.
We’re not saying that Dr. Hill’s summary of the research is wrong. But clearly there have to be some schools that are getting it right — that are indeed using student-level data to improve instruction for students and are seeing gains. Meaning, even if it’s true that analyzing student assessment data doesn’t usually boost achievement, that doesn’t mean that it can’t.
We initially set out to investigate how teachers in “tested grades” in a handful of schools perceived assessment and accountability practices. We wanted to learn what they considered useful and useless about how these practices played out in their schools, and offer up a few practical recommendations to better inform local assessment and accountability policies.
But along the way, we uncovered a larger narrative about how data-driven instruction was working in their schools and what they thought needed to be in place for it to happen effectively. So that’s the piece you now have in your hands.
We conducted a humble three-school case study in the backyard of the Fordham National Office with three groups of classroom teachers from three public elementary schools in the District of Columbia that have “beat the odds.” That means they’ve earned a 4 or 5 on the 2018 DC School Transparency and Reporting (STAR) Framework. Per its namesake, schools are rated in the framework from 1 to 5 stars (5 being the highest), using measures of academic achievement, student growth, school environment, English language proficiency, and graduation rates for various student subgroups in the school.
What’s more, these three schools — two in the District of Columbia Public School (DCPS) system and one belonging to a reputable charter management organization — achieved a 4 or 5 in buildings where more than half of the students were identified as “at risk,” meaning that they were low-income, homeless, or in foster care.² Only six elementary schools met this criteria in 2018.
We interviewed a total of twenty-one third to fifth grade reading and math teachers (the grades that administer the state test), comprising three groups of seven teachers from each school. The focus groups occurred in early June 2019 during the final weeks before schools were closing for summer vacation. The participating schools included:
- Langdon Elementary School (Grades PK–5, traditional public school, Ward 5)³
- Tubman Elementary School (Grades PK–5, traditional public school, Ward 1)⁴
- KIPP DC Promise Academy (Grades K–4, charter school, Ward 7)⁵
Washington, D.C., unlike most big cities, is home to a growing public school system with nearly half of its students in the traditional sector and the other half in the charter sector.⁶ Hence, this trio might be viewed as a microcosm of successful, beat-the-odds elementary schools in the nation’s capital. After describing how test results are used in the schools, we discuss how successful data-driven instruction intersects with three key components: school culture, teamwork, and accountability.
Using Data for Instruction
It’s helpful first to get an idea of what formative and summative tests are in place in our school trio so that we know what data are available to teachers. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is D.C.’s “state” test administered in April through May. Based on the Common Core standards, it is a math and ELA test for students in grades 3–12. PARCC scores comprise 70 of the total 95 points of schools’ STAR ratings for elementary and middle schools.⁷ In addition to PARCC, teacher interviewees discussed a number of formative and diagnostic measures that comprise their testing landscape, including:
i-Ready: a computer-adaptive math test to identify students’ on-grade level proficiency and provide tailored instruction and practice for grades 2–8
Measures of Academic Progress (MAP): a computer-adaptive reading, science, and math test to measure and track students’ achievement independent of grade level for grades K–12
Achievement Network (ANet): an English language arts/literacy (ELA) and math test aligned with the Common Core standards to indicate students’ mastery of standards for grades 3–10
Reading Inventory (RI): a computer-adaptive reading test to evaluate students’ reading abilities and monitor progress over time for grades 2–10
Text-to-Reading Comprehension (TRC): a reading test to determine students’ overall reading ability and areas of needed instructional intervention for grades K–5
Fountas and Pinnel (F&P): a reading test to identify students’ independent and instructional reading levels for grades K–8
Bends assessments: quizzes that are taken at the end of each “bend,” or topic within a Unit of Study, in Readers Workshop
Teachers from each school emphasized the potential of tests to provide recurring and relevant student data to guide their practice. Yet they were quick to point out that some tests worked better than others and more was not necessarily better. In fact, most felt that there were too many tests and favored streamlining them to carve out more time to address deficiencies that the results had uncovered (see Sidebar: Too Many Tests, Too Little Time to Remediate after the conclusion for more on this issue).
Real-time test results, ideally delivered at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, were most useful to see learning growth over time. Aligned to teachers’ curricula, such results generated weak and strong areas of student performance and significantly informed individual, small group, and whole group instruction.
“I look at this and am like, ‘Oops. We didn’t get it. We’re going to go back and reteach that during the intervention block. We’re going to go do this for morning work.’ I think that’s the immediate feedback I use on a day-to-day basis.”
“Beginning-of-the-year [BOY] data lets me know, ‘Okay, my [students] that I just got in third grade? [The data] told me you were here. Clearly, this tells me something different because we’ve lost things over the summer, but at least I’m not prepping and planning for here, [when] my children are coming in here. So that’s current, plausible data for me. Doing it BOY, MOY [middle-of-year], EOY [end-of-year] works.”
“With each module, we do a mid-module assessment and an end-of-module assessment, so that’s fourteen of those, about an hour-long test for each one. And I find that data helpful because, especially the mid-module, I can see so far how they’re doing in certain skills, and I can design my small groups based on that.”
“We closely analyze data, work very closely with our instructional coaches to look at what our kids’ specific needs are, where there are some gaps, and we come up with plans on how to reach those kids and carefully monitor their progress.”
Teachers also identified particular virtues of assessments that worked well for them. They praised i-Ready in particular for providing visuals that displayed students’ progress in ways that students could easily see for themselves.
“I felt like with the iReady, the majority of my kids were motivated to reach their growth goal. They had this intrinsic motivation to meet their growth…. It’s so visual, so they can see where they’re progressing.”
“[i-Ready] breaks it down by standard, too — what standards the kids are really strong in and what their weaknesses are…. You can figure out exactly where the kid needs more support from this i-Ready because it’s diagnostic.”
“They have a whole folder, where they have their goal sheet, and they track their progress on i-Ready…. We revisit that goal sheet, and they write down their score, track their progress, draw a little graph for themselves, see what their growth is…and we check in right before the test and right after, like here’s your goal; this is what you’re aiming for. They come back to that goal sheet — ‘Did I meet it? No? Yes? Why or why not?’ And we do that before each one.”
Several ELA teachers mentioned that F&P and Bends assessments were good tools to monitor reading-level progression. Others appreciated that ANet was administered multiple times to show student performance gains and losses over the course of the school year. In general, teachers valued tests that were aligned to their standards.
“I think that if you think of [the ANet assessments] as benchmarks to where [students] need to be by the end, they can be very helpful because they take a cluster of standards, and they take a different cluster of standards, [and] a different cluster, and then they take all the standards. And hopefully by the time you’re at the fourth one, you are seeing the improvement. And I think the way it’s been presented to us, or the way I’ve perceived it, is that it’s to help us…get a gauge as to where we are going to be on the PARCC. Where are we going on the ‘big one’ that is important?”
School Culture
Several essential components of healthy school cultures have been shown to promote teacher efficacy and student learning. They include educators sharing common values, goals, and norms; holding consistent and high expectations for students; and showing students they know and care about them.⁸ Studies have also shown that students with caring and supportive interpersonal relationships in school — measured through classroom observations and teacher/student surveys — report increased positive academic attitudes and values, satisfaction with school, and higher academic engagement.⁹
These findings resonated with us in conversations with teachers, all of whom work within challenging school contexts. In their eyes, the main engine driving improvement is a strong and supportive culture, whether already established or still developing. Having collective agreement or buy-in about what constitutes that culture is an important first step.
“When I think about the culture here…this is the first year that we really talked about it. Like it was brought to the table, discussed like, ‘What does that look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like?’ Not only in the classroom, but in the hallways, across the grades, and even as a staff.”
“When we started here, there was a tradition. We believed we would all work hard, and we would all put out a great product. [We] went to the next level. So it was an expectation that we set that, when children leave [here], we want people to be able to say, ‘They did a good job,’ and that’s something we pride ourselves in.”
“I feel the administration is very consistent with their expectations for us…. The coaching, the feedback — all of that is very consistent and expected. So I feel like there is a lot of consistency that helps to keep the supportive culture, especially with the students that we’re working with. They need consistency.”
Teachers described the importance of strong relationships with students and the foundation that it laid for mutual success. The general consensus was that teachers need to care about students individually, including their personal interests, and make the course content relevant and applicable to their lives. When they do that, students reciprocate and begin caring more about the work that they produce.
“I would attribute a majority of our success to — well, I’ll speak for myself — I would say community-building, our relationships with the students. I think when you have stronger relationships with the kids and the greater community, the kids are more invested in their education, and, therefore, more invested in doing their best on assessments.”
“You can probably count on your hand — one hand — how many referrals we’ve written this year. And that’s [from] being great relationship monitors and also the relationships we develop. We’re not always the nicest person, but we do have relationships where the kids trust us and know that we care.”
“The relationship I have with the child might be the reason why they don’t feel like they want to work hard [and why] they don’t want to listen to me. I just think about the relationship that we have. I think about, ‘Do they feel successful?’ Because if not, they’re not going to work as hard because they don’t feel like they can.”
Moreover, because teachers had already established strong relationships with their students, they were better equipped to motivate students to do their best. Some spoke of eliciting more student ownership over learning or leveraging tests as a competition that encouraged students to excel.
“[We are] trying to figure out how we can grow participation based on how we are presenting materials so that [students] want to participate, so that they have more choice. You know, and that ties back into responsibility as well. Just trying to give them a little bit more freedom.”
“It is a lot of data, but you see growth, and [students] see it within themselves, and they’re trying to outshine their last four [scores], so it becomes a competition within themselves. And kind of amongst each other, too, so they’re striving to be the top or the best.”
“I tell my kids straight up, ‘This test doesn’t represent you, doesn’t represent your intelligence. But at the same time, people are going to view it that way, and let’s just prove them wrong. Let’s knock it out the park!’”
Furthermore, teachers described how a focus on family engagement was key to improving the school culture. Strategies involved conducting home visits and constantly communicating with families about student progress. Those at another school hailed efforts to provide families with opportunities to build relationships with the school outside of academic or disciplinary matters. Examples included a first-grade movie night, family book club, or back-to-school block party. One teacher put it this way:
“What we try to do is just put as many positive family engagement strategies in place as possible to create buy-in. Which is pretty much what we try to do with the kids. ‘I can’t actually make [a parent] do anything, and that’s fine. We’re going to try to build in these systems and routines for you to just do what you’re supposed to do, even if you don’t want to.’”
Teamwork
Interviewees had no trouble identifying factors that they believed contributed to the creation, maintenance, and strengthening of their school’s supportive culture. At the top of the list was a strong sense of teamwork — both among educators and between educators and school leadership. This sense of teamwork bred open communication, trust, and intentionality moving forward.
“My leadership will watch us and hold us accountable but also support us in our decisions. And we will go to them and say things if we’re not agreeing with something, or we try to use our voices as well to speak up for what we know our kids need.”
“I think the autonomy to do what’s best for us and our room and our space also helps a lot. So I can do what works for my students, right? And if it’s not working for my students, I have the option to take a risk and try something different.”
“I think the other thing is that we are very reflective as schools, as networks, as teams. So there’s a lot of time and resources given into taking a look at the previous year and what are actionable items we can do to improve the next year.”
“I think as an organization we often start new curriculum, new ideas, new policies that are built on feedback and reflections from past years. And then even down to leadership, they’re very supportive in terms of behavior. But then also if you need anything, any questions answered, I’ve always felt like there’s an open door. I can just go in any time and be like, ‘Hey, I need this, I need this,’ and they’re always there. So it’s pretty much all in — ‘What can I do? What can we do?’”
This level of trust and communication fostered a family atmosphere indicative of the notion that “it takes a village to raise a child.” The collaborative norms in each school reinforced the idea that students belong to all teachers, not to any individual teacher to whose room they are assigned for that year.
“If [that teacher’s] teaching a skill, and she has twenty [students who need one thing] and then she has another three where they’re lost, and they’re going to need that extra time, she knows she has the flexibility to come to me and say, ‘Look, I need these twenty this week in the morning. These three in the evening’….We’re going to put together who needs what.”
“If something is being corrected near the hallway by my class[room], two people are listening on the back of the line while I’m focusing on the front…. We all correct each other’s children because they don’t just belong to [that teacher] or, you know, anyone. They belong to us. So again, we look out for one another.”
“I feel like I can lean on my coworkers if something comes up that I’m struggling with. I can really go to my teammates and say, ‘I really need help with this — it’s a last-second change,’ and there’s support right there for me if I need it.”
“The one thing I do love is the family environment. Everyone is so welcoming and just very helpful. I like that we can articulate with one another and share our practices and know that it’s safe. Like, ‘She told me this, and I can use it.’”
One way teachers can achieve the level of school success that they have is to work together and openly share their individual successes — without regard for seniority or experience. One interviewee summarized it this way:
“Even though Ms. [name] has been here the longest, she is readily available to share her best practices and says, ‘This works for me. You want it? Okay, here you go,’ and vice versa. So I feel that there’s not a big head; there’s no conceited people here. They know that they’re doing well and they feel that doing well for me is not just for my children; this is about our children. And so when I share good practices, I can pass it along, and that goes for everyone. If I’m missing a packet, Mr. [name] has me, ‘Oh, here you go. I have an extra one.’ That’s something that you don’t see very often in any other school climate or culture. Normally, people will keep things to themselves as if that’s the holy grail for them and them alone, and they are the one that’s supposed to reach the heights, instead of us collectively working together to make it work.”
Accountability
Not surprisingly, this strong sense of teamwork meant that educators had little tolerance for individuals not pulling their weight. The team’s collective success was predicated on the contributions of each educator, so accountability was both formal and informal, focusing on both the individual and team.
As for formal accountability, retention and pay are linked to traditional public school educators’ performance on the district’s IMPACT teacher-evaluation measure. For fourth grade teachers and above, individual value-added student achievement data from PARCC comprises 35 percent of a teacher’s evaluation in math and reading. Teacher-assessed student achievement measures gauge impact on student learning via assessments other than PARCC, such as end-of-year reading and writing exams, and comprise 15 percent.¹⁰
So it’s understandable why DCPS educators bring up IMPACT when asked about teacher-level accountability. This teacher’s remarks were particularly forthright:
“We have this thing called IMPACT in D.C. So no matter who you are, it’s your livelihood; you have to think about the test…. I don’t let it worry me as much. I feel like if I do my job, they might not pass it, but any child that comes in my classroom, they’re going to be better. Might not pass it — they may be coming from a lower level — but they’re going to show growth. And for me…that’s all I need. I really don’t care what IMPACT says. And you have to almost be that way — but you have to be good at what you do because, at the end of the day, it’s a really dirty game where you could actually lose your job, and you’ve done everything that you’re supposed to.”
Still, more often than not, teachers spoke of holding each other accountable informally for student performance. Several expressed to nodding heads that if they didn’t prepare their students for the following academic year, they’d let down their colleagues in the grade-level above them.
“I think accountability starts with us. We all hold each other to high standards because if you had [the students] the year before, and I get them, and I don’t feel you put your heart and soul in it, we’re going to have a conversation.”
“Let me know before [your students] come to me what their deficiencies were…. If somebody is here just for the paycheck, and you don’t buy into it, they’re not going to last. Because of the fact that we’re going to call you out like, ‘What are you doing?’”
Just as often, teachers also discussed holding themselves accountable for student learning. For the most part, they believed that the success and failure of an individual student reflected the success and failure of both their individual — and collective — efforts.
“When I think about accountability, like if my kids aren’t succeeding, I just look at myself like there’s something that I’m doing wrong.”
“I think that we hold ourselves accountable, as well. We know what’s required to meet specific standards, and from that, we depend on each other. I know that [the other teachers] all hold themselves accountable, too.”
“If the child is tantruming and tearing up their work every day, it’s often easy to be like, ‘Ah, they don’t want to work hard!’ But you have to really think about your strategies and what you have done to really try and understand this child and get to their level. There’s always something, unfortunately. That’s why we’re here. But we could do better. And so if a child is showing these behaviors, there is something that we could do more to dig deeper.”
The school’s culture and orientation around teamwork helped in turn to hold students accountable for their learning. Teachers endeavored to foster students’ sense of ownership and pride in their work and performance.
“We tell our students that they are solely responsible and accountable for themselves. You know, ‘You can’t control life, you can’t control your circumstances, but at the end of the day, you are responsible.’”
“I would say we try intentionally to push more accountability towards [the quality of their] work, even more [than we do] for behavior…. When there’s a focus on behavior — solely how you’re behaving — then behavior does become the issue. But when the focus is achievement and the work that we’re producing and the work and the level of the work that we’re producing, the focus then becomes the work. And so it’s a much more healthy accountability system, in my perspective.”
Conclusion
Langdon Elementary, Tubman Elementary, and KIPP DC-Promise Academy do well by their students, in part, because they practice an “our kids” mentality that permeates their school culture, orientation to teamwork, and approach to accountability. This looks like teachers and administrators helping one another and doing what’s best for all students in the building, not only the ones in their classrooms. Teachers hold themselves and their peers accountable because of their deep-rooted beliefs that their students’ success is a reflection of their commitment, their instruction, and their schools.
Not surprisingly, these educators attribute their students’ above-average performance to lots of hard work. They recognize the value of assessment data, particularly when those tests are focused on students’ progress over the year and aligned to their daily classroom instruction. But they still feel overburdened with the number of required formative tests, and if they had it their way, they would undoubtedly assess kids less often and administer shorter tests. To our eyes, that seems like a problem that could be easily addressed by district and CMO leadership, particularly for schools like these that have earned such leeway.
The bigger lesson — one much harder to replicate — is the team-centric approach that these schools embrace, which tends to breed both an individual and collective sense of responsibility for the academic progress and welfare of the children in each building. Many call that “accountability.” Teachers in these three D.C. schools call it the right thing to do.
Tran Le is Research Assistant at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where Amber Northern is Senior Vice President for Research. Our sincere thanks to the participating teachers and leaders in the District of Columbia and the DCPS Office of Data Systems and Strategy who made this research possible.
SIDEBAR: Too Many Tests, Too Little Time to Remediate
In line with the recent, national angst about testing and accountability, teachers reported being rushed and at times overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of assessments. By that, they mostly meant the formative tests that have been layered on to one another year after year, with little attention to the particular purposes they serve.
“I think [students are] over-tested. A lot of times when you test so much, before I can even accomplish what’s needed on the first assessment, we’re giving them a second assessment. So sometimes, I haven’t even fixed what was wrong before we’re testing again.”
“Testing is a stressful period. We just aggregate data until we’re blue in the face. That’s something that we do every day. So we curtail our teaching towards whatever data that is possible.”
“There’s definitely this battle between assessing and then over-assessing and then having too much data and being like, ‘I don’t even know how to use this.’”
“It’s exhausting for [students]. It’s a lot. And frankly, I think it’s exhausting for us, too.”
Teachers referred to what seemed to us an alphabet soup of testing acronyms. From best we could tell, i-Ready and MAP were each administered in the beginning, middle, and end of the school year in math, and ANet was administered each quarter in reading. Students also took in reading RI, TRC, and F&P three times per year each. And for every unit in Readers Workshop, they took three Bends assessments.¹¹ PARCC testing is administered two to three weeks during the spring — for example, on Tuesday through Friday one week, and Tuesday through Thursday the next week, each of which runs about an hour and a half long.
The common sentiment was not only that there are too many tests, but multiple entities requiring them who aren’t communicating with one other. As a result, the purpose of each test was unclear to them, and some mentioned that repetitive or unhelpful assessments were rarely, if ever, omitted. Teachers also seemed confused about which entity, the district or school, was mandating each test and whether each was required.
If it were up to them, interviewees would administer fewer and shorter tests and use the additional time to review assessment results and reteach material as needed. They thought that shorter tests could be equally informative and advantageous. One teacher’s remark captured the prevailing sentiment well: “In an ideal world, I might make PARCC like four days instead of two weeks. I think that’s crazy, just making nine- and ten-year-olds take a test for two weeks straight.” Others were in favor of eliminating MAP since they considered it unaligned to their standards, too reliant on formulaic skills, and/or excessively lengthy.
With less time spent on preparing for and administering tests, teachers say that they would be better positioned to interpret the assessment data they receive and apply it appropriately to their instruction. Simply put, they would have more time to plan, teach, and review — which they deemed more helpful for students’ learning than sitting for so many tests.
“I think we get through a lot of material, and we get through it pretty quickly, and I wish there was a little bit more time to go over and reteach and get that time. There just isn’t really that time built into our schedule.”
“I would provide more time to review. I would be more intentional with the tests and then what I’m reviewing on the said test. It’s actually going to impact them. It’s not going to be some kind of learning that just falls out of the sky and goes away somewhere.”
“Spend the time to fix whatever isn’t working.”
“Give us some time in between [tests] to just teach…. We’re losing the whole focus of opening up the world to these kids. It’s all about testing now, and they are like mini-robots.”
Endnotes
¹ Hill, Heather C., “Does Studying Student Data Really Raise Test Scores?” Education Week, February 7, 2020, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/02/10/does-studying-student-data-really-raise-test.html.
² The Office of the State Superintendent of Education defines “at risk” students as those who qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program (SNAP) benefits, have been identified as homeless during the academic year, are under the care of the Child and Family Services Agency, or, for high schoolers, are at least one year older than the expected age for their grade.
³ Ward 5 is in northeastern D.C.. In 2016, its racial and ethnic diversity score was 10 percent, African American population was 71 percent, and child poverty rate was 18 percent. (Coffin, Chelsea. Landscape of Diversity in D.C. Public Schools. Washington, D.C.: D.C. Policy Center, 2018. https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/landscape-of-diversity-in-dc-public-schools/.)
⁴ Ward 1 is in central D.C.. In 2016, its racial and ethnic diversity score was 37 percent, African American population was 33 percent, and child poverty rate was 25 percent. (Ibid.)
⁵ Ward 7 is in eastern D.C.. In 2016, its racial and ethnic diversity score was 2 percent, African American population was 94 percent, and child poverty rate was 41 percent. (Ibid.)
⁶ Overall enrollment in the District’s public schools — including charter and traditional public campuses — grew by 1.7 percent to 94,603 students in the 2019–2020 academic year, with the traditional system accounting for 54 percent of the city’s public school students. The charter sector — with more than 100 schools — enrolled 43,556 students. (Stein, Perry, “D.C. charter schools experience first enrollment drop since 1996.” The Washington Post, October 22, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-charter-schools-experience-first-enrollment-decline-since-1996/2019/10/22/95d691f6-f4da-11e9-a285-882a8e386a96_story.html.)
⁷ For high schools, PARCC scores comprise 40 points out of a total 95.
⁸ Vangrieken, Katrien, Filip Dochy, Elisabeth Raes, and Eva Kyndt. “Teacher collaboration: A systematic review.” Educational research review 15 (2015): 17–40.; Klem, Adena M., and James P. Connell. “Relationships matter: Linking teacher support to student engagement and achievement.” Journal of school health 74, no. 7 (2004): 262–273.
⁹ Solomon, Daniel, Victor Battistich, Marilyn Watson, Eric Schaps, and Catherine Lewis. “A six-district study of educational change: Direct and mediated effects of the Child Development Project.” Social psychology of education 4, no. 1 (2000): 3–51.; Furrer, Carrie, and Ellen Skinner. “Sense of relatedness as a factor in children’s academic engagement and performance.” Journal of educational psychology 95, no. 1 (2003): 148.; Roorda, Debora L., Helma MY Koomen, Jantine L. Spilt, and Frans J. Oort. “The influence of affective teacher–student relationships on students’ school engagement and achievement: A meta-analytic approach.” Review of educational research 81, no. 4 (2011): 493–529.
¹⁰ The other 50 percent of the IMPACT score includes a measure of teachers’ essential practices (measuring instructional expertise), student surveys of practice (measuring instructional culture), commitment to the school community (measuring teachers’ support and collaboration with the school community), and core professionalism (measuring the four basic professional requirements for all school-based personnel). (District of Columbia Public Schools. IMPACT: The DCPS Effectiveness Assessment System for School-Based Personnel: 2017–2018. Group 1: Teachers (Grades 4+) with Individual Value-Added Student Achievement and Student Survey Data. Washington, D.C., 2018. https://dcps.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dcps/publication/attachments/1.) For third grade teachers and above in untested grades and subjects, essential practices make up 65 percent of their IMPACT score, and teacher-assessed student achievement measures still comprise 15 percent. (District of Columbia Public Schools. IMPACT: The District of Columbia Public Schools Effectiveness Assessment System for School-Based Personnel: 2017–2018. Group 2: Teachers (Grades 3+) with Student Survey Data. Washington, D.C., 2018. https://dcps.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/dcps/publication/attachments/2.)
¹¹ The administration of i-Ready, RI, and Bends assessments may vary between the traditional public schools and charter school.