Hawai'i Educational Research Association: A New Research Method for Uncovering Achievement Gap Patterns in Large-Scale Assessments to Better Inform Policy and Practice

• In Event: The Consortium of State and Regional Educational Research Associations: Distinguished Paper Session 4

Abstract

The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 has resulted in an increasingly greater focus on achievement gaps, particularly concerning different student groups and characteristics. Policymakers have enacted numerous initiatives aimed at reducing achievement disparities; however, well-intended policy efforts have demonstrated mixed and inconsistent results. Since numerous factors contribute to the achievement gap, researchers should be ever more mindful of employing methods that yield appropriate representations of the performance disparities, especially among diverse groups. Researchers have employed standard ordinary linear regression (OLS) as a means to analyze achievement gaps between student subgroups in Hawaii’s public schools. Despite the utility of OLS, it only provides a general understanding of the relationships between the outcome and predictors. Hence, we extend previous studies by demonstrating an alternate and more advanced methodology, quantile regression, for analyzing 2016–2017 Grade-3 student cohort gap patterns over the entire distribution of the reading achievement measure. The Hawaii State Department of Education’s (HIDOE) Strategic Plan recognizes that Grade-3 reading competency is a critical milestone predictive of children’s future academic success. Our findings add new and salient information to the literature and confirms the added value of the quantile regression approach as a new educational policy-research tool to investigate the differential patterns of Hawaii students’ early reading achievement that would have been missed using traditional regression methods.

Authors

• Hugh H. Dunn, University of Hawaii

• Malkeet Singh, Wake County Public School System