Establishing Growth Goals on a Five Point Scale | XM Community
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Greetings All,

 

We are currently creating our next coherence plan that will go into effect for the 24.25 school year.

 

Many of our metrics will be based on a five point rating scale.

 

We will be gathering our benchmark data this spring.

 

Our question is, what guidance do you follow for setting growth goals based off of five point scales?

 

For instance, if a score comes in at 2.85 our of 5, what is the minimum increase that is expected by the next data checkpoint?     I am assuming the scale will fluctuate and a score of 1.5/5 would expect to see a greater increase over a six month time period than the 2.85, a 3.75 or a 4.5.

 

We are interested in learning more about research (if any) is out there and/or what cut offs different organizations use to set expectations.

 

Thanks for any input that can be shared.

 

Mark Grunske

Franklin Public Schools,

Franklin, WI

Hi @MarkGrunske,

I suspect you will get a lot of different approaches and philosophies in this thread. Here is my 2 cents.

Our org doesn’t set many repeated growth goals, usually they are usually incremental and static. eg: “aim to get response rates to 40% by end of year”, “reward teaching efforts that average 4/5” and so on. Once the time period is met, the performance is reviewed and if we hit the target we think about setting the next one. It gives us a clear goal each time period and prompts us to examine underperforming areas and different solutions. It also doesn’t assume that growth will organically occur. To us, a low rating in a class means that students had a bad experience and it needs to be examined closer.

If there are external benchmarks (eg: government surveys) that we can prove are correlated to some of our internal surveys, we can also use our internal surveys as a loosely related growth indicator before the external benchmarks are updated.

In practice however, growth goal setting is kind of redundant (see Goodhart’s Law). Things will happen that cannot be explained, certain cohorts will behave differently and staff run the risk of artificially inflating the numbers upon which they have no meaning. You’re far better off trying to establish reliable measures rather than goals, and using them as information to inform decisions (which hopefully benefit the measures positively). Think of it like the vital signs in an operating theater; the doctors and nurses monitor the data and use it to supplement their decisions in a holistic manner.

That’s all I’ve got for now. All the best with your work!

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