A report from the Regional Education Laboratory Mid-Atlantic at Mathematica examines how the School District of Philadelphia can use Pennsylvania’s Kindergarten Entry Inventory (KEI) to predict future rates of third-grade reading proficiency.

The study set a threshold on an index of two dimensions of the Pennsylvania Kindergarten Entry Inventory (KEI)–Emerging Academic Competencies and Learning Engagement Competencies–to measure whether student cohorts are likely to be proficient in English language arts (ELA) on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) in grade 3. Accurate prediction of the proficiency rate of the full cohort of students was possible despite a large number of errors in predicting the proficiency of individual students.