Abstract

Artificial data were used to assess the correlation between several estimates of average student change in various schools and the “true” impact of those schools. Results indicate that all estimates involving pretest-posttest differences measure school impact with reasonable accuracy. It is important to measure change over the entire course of learning, however, and not just over the later stages of learning. The correlations between change scores and other school characteristics reflect with reasonable accuracy the relationships between those characteristics and impact, but consequently will be large only when the underlying relationships are substantial. Simple gain scores measure the true situation about as accurately as other change estimates, are easier to compute, and probably are more meaningful to non-researchers.

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