Let’s talk about multiple measures. Many state and federal regulations now require schools to report multiple measures — multiple measures of student achievement, that is. While we applaud these changes from the old method of using one standardized achievement score to make decisions about how well a school is doing, multiple measures of student learning alone are not sufficient for comprehensive school improvement, and, in fact, can be misleading in this regard.
Many educators believe that over 50 percent of student achievement results can be explained by other factors. That being true, if we want to change the results we are getting, we have to understand the other 50 percent to know why we are getting the results we are getting. Then we need to change what we do in order to get different results.
Any definition of multiple measures should include four major measures of data — not just student learning, but also demographics, perceptions, and school processes. Analyses of demographics, perceptions, student learning, and school processes provide a powerful picture that will help us understand the school’s impact on student achievement. When used together, these measures give schools the information they need to improve teaching and learning to get positive results.
In the figure that follows, the four major measures are shown as overlapping circles. The figure illustrates the type of information that one can gain from individual measures and the enhanced levels of analyses that can be gained from the intersections of the measures.
One measure by itself gives useful information. Comprehensive measures, used together and over time, provide much richer information. Ultimately, schools need to be able to predict what we must do
to meet the needs of all students they have, or will have in the future. The information gleaned from the intersections of these four measures (demographics, perceptions, student learning, and school processes) helps us to define the questions we want to ask, and focuses us on what data are necessary in order to find the answers.
Demographic data provide descriptive information about the school community, such as enrollment, attendance, grade level, ethnicity, gender, and native language. Demographic data are very important for us to understand. They are the part of our educational system over which we have little or no control, but with which we can observe trends and glean information for purposes of prediction and planning. Demographic data assist us in understanding the results of all parts of our educational system through the disaggregation of other measures by demographic variables.
Perceptions data help us understand what students, parents, teachers, and others think about the learning environment. Perceptions can be gathered in a variety of ways—through questionnaires, interviews, and observations. Perceptions are important since people act in congruence with what they believe, perceive, or think about different topics. It is important to know student, teacher, and parent perceptions of the school so school personnel kno