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ERIC Number: EJ973866
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Aug
Pages: 29
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1076-9986
EISSN: N/A
Estimating Achievement Gaps from Test Scores Reported in Ordinal "Proficiency" Categories
Ho, Andrew D.; Reardon, Sean F.
Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, v37 n4 p489-517 Aug 2012
Test scores are commonly reported in a small number of ordered categories. Examples of such reporting include state accountability testing, Advanced Placement tests, and English proficiency tests. This article introduces and evaluates methods for estimating achievement gaps on a familiar standard-deviation-unit metric using data from these ordered categories alone. These methods hold two practical advantages over alternative achievement gap metrics. First, they require only categorical proficiency data, which are often available where means and standard deviations are not. Second, they result in gap estimates that are invariant to score scale transformations, providing a stronger basis for achievement gap comparisons over time and across jurisdictions. The authors find three candidate estimation methods that recover full-distribution gap estimates well when only censored data are available. (Contains 7 figures, 1 table, and 1 note.)
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: http://sagepub.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: National Assessment of Educational Progress
IES Funded: Yes
Grant or Contract Numbers: R305A070377; R305D110018