A Method for the Construction of Differentiated School Norms

Abstract

Empirical norms are traditional and accepted tools for reporting performance. Other methods (e.g., statistical regression) are used more often in a research context to make conditional statements about performance given a certain demographic context. This article illustrates two methods for the construction of differentiated school norms and the computation of percentile ranks for school mean achievement accounting for demographic background factors. These differentiated norms facilitate reports of performance that account for demographic conditions that are beyond the control of schools. A group-based method requires the explicit identification of similar schools. Each school is located at the median of its own norm group with regard to a socioeconomic status (SES) index. The other method uses residual scores obtained from a linear regression model as the basis for percentile ranks. These two methods are compared using science achievement test scores for a sample of 1,573 schools. The effects of varying the size of the norm group are illustrated with reading achievement test scores from a sample of 797 high schools.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.