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.

Monday, January 16, 2017

What would you do with $100 million?

In a paper presented at the California Educational Research Association annual conference in Sacramento last December I demonstrated how the Academic Support Index was able to identify up to 40% more underperforming students than the current practice used for the Local Control Funding Formula Supplemental (LCFF-S) budget. Using the ASI method instead of the LCFF-S method could potentially result in the reallocation of up to $100 million dollars in the state of California. The ASI method was able to do this while having significantly lower rates of both false positives as well as false negatives.

CERA Presentation: ASI vs. LCFF

Hi,
Thank you for attending my presentation today. If you have any questions or are interested in using the Academic Support Index please email me at davestevens@berkeley.net. If you would like to view the presentation, please click here.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

A post for schools where all the students might considered to be "at-risk"

A number of schools have asked if the Academic Support Index would help them as "all of our students are at risk." "At-risk" is a binary categorical variable dividing students into two groups: those who are at-risk and those that aren't. Is a student a little bit at-risk? A medium amount? A lot? The term "at-risk" does not tell you the degree to which a student is at-risk for academic under performance. And how is that pool of "at-risk students being identified? By being poor? First generation? Having a disability? By race?

LCAP: Which is better at identifying potentially underperforming students: ASI 3+ or "Unduplicated"?

I was wondering: How different are the categories of ASI 3 and higher and the LCAP's "Unduplicated students" and how well do they predict academic difficulties?

One consideration for schools working to improve the outcomes for struggling students...

The graphic below is an important consideration when working with students who struggle academically. It is based on a presentation by Dr. Frank Worrell of the University of California Berkeley given at the Berkeley Unified School District's Research Symposium on November 6th, 2015.

Essentially, he says that protection of self worth is a primary driver in human decision making. I put together the graphic below to try to summarize this point. There are four student pathways: "I study and succeed", "I don't study and I succeed", "I study and I fail", and "I don't study and I fail".