ERB’s mission goes beyond creating assessments and other measurement tools; we empower educators to utilize and interpret the data they collect to identify trends, inform classroom instruction, and support the whole child. We also regularly analyze data from across member schools to uncover broader trends to help independent school educators benchmark their own performance and place their school’s data in a broader context.
We recently reported on key findings of an analysis of our student learning data from 2023-2024 during a webinar with President Tom Rochon offering a comprehensive, multi-year view of student progress in independent schools, along with actionable insights to guide decision-making in the upcoming year.
Placing Assessment Data in Context
In the 2023-2024 school year, roughly 200,000 students from ERB member schools participated in ERB’s Comprehensive Testing Program, and 30,000 took Milestones assessments, our analysis found.
This report placed those data in context by analyzing records from multiple school years, offering a comprehensive look at trends, challenges, and growth areas. By understanding the “why” behind the following findings, educators can make informed decisions that truly impact student learning.
1. COVID had uneven impacts.
Rochon explained that student growth year-to-year typically occurs in a “stair step” pattern when viewed on a graph. Those students who start a school year with the lowest scores show the highest levels of learning growth, and those who start with the highest scores show the least.
This occurs for two reasons:
- Students in the lower part of the distribution have more grade-level material left to learn, allowing more significant potential score increases.
- Independent schools are adept at identifying students who may need to catch up and support them with additional resources.
During COVID-19, however, growth was fairly flat, regardless of students’ starting points — meaning that the lower-performing students were not catching up like they typically do during a school year and were experiencing greater harm from the interruption.
Test Score Growth by Level of Student Performance, Pre-COVID and During COVID
2. Performance growth has largely rebounded in independent schools.
Independent school assessment scores tell a different story compared with public schools, which continue to fall short of pre-pandemic learning levels, research has found.
“The current level of student growth in ERB member schools is generally indistinguishable from 2018 and 2019,” Rochon said. “In other words, that dramatic COVID-19 impact is simply gone.”
Notably, Rochon points out, the stair-step pattern has been reestablished across CTP and Milestones subject areas. In fact, the 2023-2024 school year is the third in a row that learning growth in math has been significantly higher across the board than it was before the pandemic.
While the reasons for this shift aren’t yet clear, Rochon noted that this acceleration is visible across every quartile of CTP scores, though it’s most striking among the highest-achieving students.
Pre- and Post-COVID Learning Growth by Student Achievement
“The current level of student growth in ERB member schools is generally indistinguishable from 2018 and 2019. In other words, that dramatic COVID-19 impact is simply gone.”
— Tom Rochon, ERB President
3. Lower-scoring students need ongoing support.
Despite those promising findings, the ERB report shows that there are still areas in which educators may need to focus additional resources—like English Language Arts (ELA) and verbal and quantitative reasoning.
While ELA students in the lower and middle quartiles are once again showing greater learning gains across a year than their peers in the top quartiles, their growth rates still remain slightly lower than before COVID. The highest-scoring students’ rates have fully recovered.
Similarly, while the students who score highest on reasoning assessments now show higher levels of learning growth than prior to the pandemic and median scorers match previous levels, the bottom quartile continues to lag behind 2018-2019 growth metrics.
This is a concern, Rochon says, because students who enter a grade with lower levels of subject-matter attainment have more catching up to do each year to stay at grade level. Each year that their growth rates remain depressed, they risk falling farther behind.
Pre- and Post-COVID Learning Growth by Student Achievement
Implications for Independent School Educators
Overall, Rochon says, ERB member schools have collectively fully recovered to pre-COVID learning growth levels. Nevertheless, the data also show that lower-performing students have not seen as much acceleration as their higher-performing peers — and failing to address this trend could result in widening achievement gaps.
Fortunately, the data ERB offers to member schools can empower educators to take meaningful steps to help all students unlock their full potential.
1. Identify and address individual needs.
Educators can use the ERB 360 Access data reporting platform to view key metrics and pull targeted reports to pinpoint areas where individuals or groups of students may be struggling, and then tailor their instruction accordingly. For example, if only a few students show sustained difficulty, the right solution may be tutoring sessions, while if an entire class continues to struggle with an area like Verbal Reasoning, refocusing the curriculum may be a more effective approach.
2. Consider the whole child.
Teachers should also explore how factors outside the classroom may impact students’ growth. With ERB’s Whole Child Solution, educators can monitor how students relate to and connect with others, whether they feel a sense of belonging to the school community, and any additional stressors they may face.
3. Track progress over time.
Leverage specialized dashboards and reporting tools to monitor student growth over time and before and after changes to curricula or pedagogical approach — that way, it’s easy to quickly identify any concerning trends and adjust interventions as needed.
Rochon closed by pointing out that growing access to meaningful data offers educators unprecedented opportunities.
“We have so much more that we can do with the assessments that you undertake and the data we receive,” Rochon says.
Learn more about ERB’s academic achievement assessments, including CTP and Milestones, or request information about becoming an ERB member school.
