User's Guide: Reading the Reports
School Report - Page 3
Field #9: Learning Support Indicators
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Learning Support Indicators: Summaries
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WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT
Each learning-support indicator is a numeric score (0 – 100) that
provides information about a school and how it operates. The bar
graphs show the indicator for each school and the statewide average
for each indicator, based on school level (elementary school, middle
school, high school). These learning-support indicators are
reported for each school:
- Time in School
- Health Education Assessment (health knowledge and skills)
- School Climate
- Parental Involvement (and parent engagement)
- Instruction
High schools receive a 6th indicator: Graduation rate.
Three of the indicators are reported as percentages. Time in
School/Time Lost from School shows how many days children in each
school are present, that is, not absent because of illness,
suspensions, truancy, or other situations such as family
emergencies. The Health Education Assessment shows what percentage
of the children in each school achieved proficiency on the state
health-education assessment and what percentage failed to do so.
(Schools that do not include a grade level where the assessment is
administered the assessment receive the district’s score for grade
5 or 9.) The Graduation rate/Dropout rate shows the percentage, by
grade, of students who have graduated from/dropped out of school.
The three other learning-support indicators are index scores
derived by the 2002 SALT Survey. Each score is based on responses
to numerous questions on the surveys. The school-climate indicator
is based on parent, student, and teachers surveys; the
parental-involvement indicator is based on the parent and teacher
surveys; the instruction indicator is based on the teacher
surveys.
Go to technical bulletins for an
explanation of the learning-support indicators and how they are
calculated. WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
Test scores are useful for telling us what students have
learned and which students have learned, but the scores do not
tell us about the conditions in a school that contribute to
improved student learning. The learning-support indicators give us
information that helps educators, their school-improvement teams,
and the school communities decide what teaching practices, school
structures, and cultures should change in order to improve
learning. The learning-support indicators are meant to begin
discussions in schools and districts about what should be done to
provide the conditions in which students will be able to learn
better. For the graduation-rate indicator, the goal for each
school is 95%, matching the goal established by the R.I. Board of
Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education that no more than
5% of all students will drop out of any high school. For Time in
School, the goal is again 95%, meaning that no more than 5% of the
school year should be lost because of illness, suspensions,
truancy, and other absences.
The goal for the Health Education Assessment is 50%—half the
students in each school meeting or exceeding the standard of the
across the past three years of testing data. Students are more
likely to make healthy decisions and to avoid risky behavior when
they are equipped with the knowledge and skills to do so. The
goal for the other three indicators—School Climate, Parental
Involvement, and Instruction—is a score of 100.
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