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.

Saturday, May 28, 2022

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Wednesday, August 14, 2019

A (sort of) Brief Introduction to the Academic Support Index Framework

How does the ASI Framework support students and educators?
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Sunday, May 19, 2019

The ASI as a predictor of SAT performance

Now that the College Board is going to start providing an "Adversity Index" along with SAT scores, I thought I'd take a look at how well the ASI aligns with students' SAT scores.  The ASI itself is a measure of the academic headwinds that students face.  I suspect the Adversity Index is attempting to do something similar.


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Tuesday, April 30, 2019

A review of the Academic Support Index by Robert Kaplinsky

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Friday, April 26, 2019

AERA Division H Outstanding Paper Award for Advances in Methodology

At the 2019 American Educational Research Association meeting in Toronto our paper "Maximizing Assessment Performance of At-Risk Students Using the Academic Support Index to Engineer a Low Stress Testing Environment" was recognized by Division H (Research, Evaluation, and Assessment in Schools) in their Outstanding Paper competition under the category for Advances in Methodology.  
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Monday, January 28, 2019

IEUC San Diego 2019

Title: Focusing on Equity Using the Academic Support Index
Abstract: Closing the achievement gap is the challenge of our time. When looking at student data, it is imperative that we examine performance through a lens that focuses our attention on the right students. The Academic Support Index (ASI) provides a more nuanced and effective way to identify students for support.  In this session attendees will learn how to calculate students’ ASI, identify students for support prior to academic struggles, look at assessments in Illuminate, and evaluate academic data through the ASI lens. Research proven examples of how the ASI has been used to close the achievement gap will be provided.

 Thursday (Day 1), Session 2, 11:15-12:15, Room 24A

 Friday (Day 2), Session 8, 1:30-2:30, Room 24B

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Sunday, November 4, 2018

ASI slides for visiting WASC team

Click here to access the slide deck from the presentation. Please feel free to email me with any questions.

Learn more about using the ASI framework in your school or district here.



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Saturday, September 15, 2018

Publications, papers, and presentations

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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

AERA 2018 Slide deck

Thank you all for attending my session.  You can access the slides from the presentation here. Please feel free to email me with your thoughts, questions, or concerns.  If you have difficulty accessing this file please email me and I can send it to you directly.

Learn more about using the ASI framework in your school or district here.


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