What is the magical and mythical formula that calculates the individual student growth goals?
Good question. It’s really isn’t all that magical, or even really a specific formula. It turns out that there is not a lot of historical benchmark data out there in the world on what is an appropriate amount of growth for students in a four-week summer school program (not a big shocker). Essentially, our approach is to take different ranges of diagnostic scores and look at what collaboratives were able to achieve with students who started in those ranges in the past. Then, we used the 75th percentile as an ambitious and feasible goal. Then, we use those numbers to create a chart with growth targets for each possible diagnostic score (0-100 for the objective mastery tests). The tracking tool just looks up the right target from a chart and that’s the goal. There’s a lot more context behind why we chose this approach (and the 75th percentile number, etc.), and we can get into that in future posts, but it is pretty much that simple. Let us know what questions you have — we don’t want anyon
