Academic Support Index

Background...

All students enter school with a combination of "headwinds" and "tailwinds". Tailwinds are the things that make school easier for students. Tailwinds may include factors such as coming from a home with parents of high education levels and economic stability, being a native English speaker, not having a disability, or being a member of the cultural majority. Each of those characteristics plays a role in helping a student experience success in school.

Headwinds on the other hand make school more difficult. Headwinds can include having economic instability at home, parents with lower levels of education, having a disability, or still learning English. The more headwinds a student has, the more difficulty they will have in maximizing their academic potential and the more “tailwinds” they will need. Tailwinds come in the form of high-quality instruction, support, and intervention.

The Academic Support Index, or ASI, quantifies these headwinds. A student’s ASI is the sum of their headwinds. Their ASI can also be considered a measure of the amount of support that they will need in order to mitigate the impact of those educational headwinds. Students with a low ASI will likely need very little additional support outside of Tier 1 instruction. Higher ASI students will likely need proportionally higher amounts of Tier 2 and sometimes Tier 3 supports.

There is a strong relationship between the ASI and academic outcomes including assessments such as the SAT, Smarter Balanced Assessments, AP and IB tests, kindergarten screeners, grade point averages, rates of college eligibility, matriculation, and degree attainment. We have studied these effects over seven years of data as well as across urban, suburban, and rural schools. To date over 400,000 students have been scored on the ASI. (See the featured post below for a list of papers and presentations on the ASI).

Because the ASI is able to reliably predict student outcomes you have to opportunity to interrupt that predictability by using the ASI to make sure that you are identifying the right students for early intervention and support. With effective intervention, predictive analytics can become preventive analytics.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Are you using the Academic Support Index in your school or district?

By my latest count there are about 300,000 students that have been scored using the ASI. I'd like to share some data around both its use and applications at my presentation at the American Educational Research Association in New York in April.

Are you using the ASI and want to contribute to its knowledge base? Please email me with the following information:

1. Your name and district/school.

2. Contact information

3. Number of students scored on the ASI

4. Description of how you have been using the ASI.

You can email me by clicking on my name at the bottom of any of the blog posts.

Thank you!

Monday, January 29, 2018

Effect size of the Academic Support Index on Smarter Balanced Assessment performance

In this analysis I compare the effect size of the ASI and other demographic fields on students "distance from met" on the Smarter Balanced Assessment for English Language Arts (ELA) and Math over three years of data.

Illuminate Education Users Conference 2018

My presentation "Using the Academic Support Index as a Lens When Looking at Data" will be offered both Thursday and Friday at 9:30 AM in room 30A. You can preview the slide deck here. Feel free to send me any questions you would like addressed in advance. See you in San Diego!

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Longfellow PTA Presentation

Hi,
Thank you for attending. Follow the link below to see the slides from the presentation last night.

Office of Family Engagement and Equity Presentation

Thank you for the wonderful questions and conversation today. I really appreciated your thoughtful feedback. You can find the link to the presentation below the break.