The second plug-in is a performance index that is broken into 3 parts - a Student Performance Index, Staff Performance Index, or School Performance Index (SPI). There will be different data available regarding GPA scores, SAT’s weighted per year, and other statistics that are tracked over a period of time.
The performance index displays the change over time for a dataset (for example, if the yearly averages from 2006 to 2008 are 2.5, 2.6 and 2.4, the performance index will show a +1 change). By showing the change over time instead of merely showing yearly averages, you’ll be able to see when positive changes are occurring, when there’s stagnation or a decrease in performance. Therefore, we can enhance the learning process by monitoring performance and changing policy on the fly to positively affect the outcome.
Another interesting thing you can do with the performance index for a conglomerate of students: you can look at one student’s GPA over time, you can look at a combination of students’ GPA’s over time, but you can also look at it from a teacher’s perspective. If you look at a teacher’s sum total of their students’ performance indexes at any given time, minus the previous 5 years and plus the next 5 years, you can see the trend of those students and layer it by subject. You can see the trend of the selected students as it goes in and out of a particular teacher so that you know the relative effective level of that teacher.
One thing I want to point out is that this is a-metric, not THE metric. Classroom observation is still a wonderful tool, but this chart provides additional rich information, and we’ll include a link to PDF’s of teacher’s observations. But the Edualizer provides a snapshot view of a teacher - a digital view that can be monitored and analyzed on the fly to provide fast reaction times when policy changes are necessary.
