Thank you for attending. Please feel free ask questions in the comments or email me directly. The link to the presentation is found below.
This blog is no longer updated. Please visit the new website: academicsupportindex.com (You will need to copy/paste as blogger will not let me embed a working link)
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, October 23, 2017
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Friday, June 9, 2017
What are the "Headwinds" for experiencing school as an African American?
Unlike headwinds such as having a disability or being an English Learner, the relationship between race/ethnicity and academic outcomes is less direct. In the graphic below each of the potential contributors to the headwind includes the author of a significant paper or book on the topic. (Citations are below) I'm happy to include additional references so please feel free to email me suggestions.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
An Introduction to the Academic Support Index for Educators
Last fall at an EdSource conference, a lawyer who was one of the speakers stated "Good data is a civil right". It made me think about the data we have and how we are using it. Its not just enough to have good data, we have to use it wisely and effectively.
One of the most valuable ways to use data in education is to better understand the students we serve. Data can help us understand who our students are, what they know, and what they have yet to learn. The better we know our students, the more effective we become in helping them succeed. We also need to pay attention to what we are doing to try to improve student outcomes. When we identify practices or programs that are making a difference, we need to share them with other educators. Likewise, when an intervention isn't getting the results we hoped for, we need to go back to the drawing board, revisit our theory of action, and either make adjustments or go a different direction. We owe it to students to make sure we are providing them with the best possible education.
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.
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