How do our teachers’ CLASS scores compare the national average?

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Because of the relationship between classroom quality and child outcomes, as well as because of the role CLASS plays in DRS, Family Resource Agency (FRA) pays close attention to its teachers’ CLASS scores. Family Resource Agency wanted to understand how its current average CLASS scores compare to national CLASS scores. This enables the program to evaluate the results of its onboarding and training efforts for teaching staff and to show the Policy Council/Board at a glance how the program stacks up.

Analysis

The internal program data, which includes how individual teachers performed, is aggregated as an average score and then compared to data that is posted on the ECLKC website. The national data on the ECKLC website includes the CLASS score threshold for the lowest 10% of recently monitored grantees, the median scores, and the threshold for the highest 10% scores. Not only is the program interested in avoiding being in the lowest 10% group, but the program also aspires to be among the top performers in the nation. Therefore, the entire data landscape is compared from low to high performance.

Result

Based upon the present data, FRA can see that their teachers perform in the top 10% in each domain compared to programs evaluated in 2018. The various management teams and policy groups at FRA are pleased that the present training and onboarding processes are working and helping the program to remain at a high level of performance in these areas.


Additional details

Audience: Leadership, management, Board/PC

Level of Analysis: Grantee

Difficulty: Moderate

Content Area: DRS and CLASS

Data Sources: CLASS, Microsoft Excel

Alternative Audiences: This data could also be valuable to individual supervisors, coaches, and mentors for guiding their work with teachers.

This data could also be examined at the center level, supervisor level, teacher level, or other subgroups to see if there are any discernable patterns in regard to high or low performance. Especially at the individual staff level, this information is particularly helpful in informing supervisors, coaches, and mentors of the needs of the individuals they supervise or are responsible for. This in turn helps them make better decisions about the kinds of activities and trainings needed to help those individual teachers in their professional development.


Technical Appendix

This graph is created by downloading ChildPlus report 5620 and using Microsoft Excel to create a cylinder graph.

You can also download this template to enter your data into a similar chart.

Interested in another way to analyze this data? Check out another use case on the same topic.

Contact Information:

Sherronda Thompson, HS Director

Email: sherronda@fratn.com

Phone : 423-303-3536