Introduction

In 2018, the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) made SAS EVAAS reporting available to its districts, schools, and teachers. Available through a secure web application, this reporting supports educators with school improvement through both reflective and proactive planning tools.

The core of EVAAS reporting is growth, which measures the change in achievement over time for a group of students. The change is based on student performance on a quality standardized assessment, such as M-STEP or MAP. EVAAS uses a set of growth (or value-added) models that have been available to districts, schools, and teachers in some states since 1993. When first implemented over two decades ago, EVAAS represented a paradigm shift for educators and policymakers to consider both achievement and growth rather than achievement alone. EVAAS reporting provides personalized feedback to districts, schools, and teachers and identifies the more (or less) effective practices in use. This insight can be leveraged to improve the academic experiences of their students.

Conceptually, growth is easy to understand. As stated above, it is simply the change in achievement for a group of students over time. In practice, however, the implementation of a growth model is more complex. The models themselves are highly sophisticated in order to address common questions related to working with assessment data.

The purpose of this content is to address several of these common questions based on the EVAAS growth models.