The School District of Philadelphia’s Board of Education established Goals and Guardrails that outline achievement goals through the 2025-26 school year. Goals 1 and 3 of this framework aim to increase the percentage of students in grades 3-8 scoring Proficient or Advanced on the PSSA ELA and PSSA Math each year, respectively. Star Reading and Star Math results are used as “Leading Indicators” to track progress toward these goals. This report examines the statistical relationship between Star performance and PSSA performance in 2021-22.
This brief describes the District-wide tests administered at the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) during the 2021-22 school year and provides details about student participation.
This research brief highlights the changes in the percentage of students scoring in the Proficient or Advanced performance groups on the PSSA exams from 2019 (pre-Covid) to 2022 (post-Covid) in Pennsylvania school districts.
The 2021-22 school year was the first year that the PSSAs and Keystones were administered normally since 2018-19 (pre-pandemic). These briefs describe District-wide performance trends on the PSSAs and the Keystone exams from 2014-15 to 2021-22.
The Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) is comprised of multiple assessment anchors that represent categories of subject matter (skills and concepts). A strength profile (low, medium, high) is assigned for each anchor by weighting the anchor raw score by the difficulty of the items. This report examines the percentage of students who scored in the high, medium, and low strength profiles on each of the 3rd grade ELA PSSA assessment anchors from 2014-15 to 2018-19, identifying differences in strength profile patterns by student demographic group.
The Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) uses scale scores that correspond to performance tiers (Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced). This report examines average scale scores for the 3rd grade ELA PSSA from 2014-15 to 2018-19, identifying differences in scale score patterns by student demographic characteristics and by school.
The report is an expansion of a prior report’s discussion of PSSA and aimswebPlus data. The analysis in this report looks more deeply at the differing trajectories of aimswebPlus performance by fall 2015-16 kindergarten aimswebPlus performance group, with comparisons between students who performed in the different spring 2018-19 third grade ELA PSSA performance groups.
This brief describes which District-wide tests, among those regularly administered by the Office of Assessment each year, were administered during the mostly virtual 2020-21 school year. For those tests that were administered, details on about student participation are provided.
This report examines the reading performance of the 2015-16 kindergarten student cohort over time, including how student performance on the aimswebPlus assessment changed between kindergarten (2015-16) and third grade (2018-19), how student performance on the aimswebPlus assessment change between kindergarten and third grade by demographic characteristics, and how student performance on the aimswebPlus assessment changed between kindergarten and third grade grouped by third grade ELA PSSA performance.
This report summarizes Math PSSA performance across four years (2015-16 through 2018-19). In general, performance across the four years was characterized by incremental year-to-year improvements.