Achievement gaps in educational outcomes are persistent disparities in measures of educational performance among subgroups of U.S. students. Most notable are gaps between groups defined by race or ethnicity, income, and gender. An achievement gap can surface in a variety of outcome measures, including standardized test scores, grades, dropout rates, college enrollment and completion rates. I’m going to focus here on standardized test scores. If we want to make comparisons across U.
A norm-referenced test is one whose score gives an estimate of where a person stands on the trait or skill being tested, relative to some representative group. In education, the skills being tested might range over things like reading comprehension, vocabulary, basic arithmetic, algebra, and more. The representative group may also be referred to as the “normative sample” or “norm group”. For an educational test, the normative sample is nothing more than a group of children, aggregated by age, who have taken the test.
This article is a primer on how to tabulate, organize, and document data for people who don’t have much experience with it.1 I will introduce you to some basic concepts and terms that are common to data work and data organization. Any examples will have an educational tint, but that’s just because I often work with educators. The framework sketched here will apply to most other kinds of data. I’ll assume spreadsheet software is the tool you will likely use for entering and organizing the data, because spreadsheets are widely available and familiar to most people.
“Evidence–based practice” has been a buzz word in education for some years now.1 However, understanding just what constitutes evidence, and what doesn’t, can be challenging. In Randomistas, Andrew Leigh digs in to one of the most important forms of evidence in the educational, social, and medical sciences, the “randomized controlled trial”. He spells out in plain language just what it is, and why it is considered the gold standard for evidence of what works in education and many other areas of research.