The Power of Expected vs. Actual Data

Pathfinder provides administrators and teachers with relative data that supports greater understanding of student and classroom performance on assessments. The Pathfinder team creates this relative data by calculating an “Expected Result” for each student and class using baseline scores from the previous year’s state assessment. See ‘How does Pathways Calculate Expected Performance?’ to understand how expected results are calculated. 

A common explanation from teachers with low test scores is that their classroom for the particular year has lower performing students. This is a fair explanation - data can be misleading without the context of preliminary student levels and expectations. Using expected vs. actual results, however, can eliminate this problem in interpreting data. 

For example, if an administrator observed the following data from Benchmark results, they may assume that Jonathon Ingram, Jaylin Rios, and Maurice Fitzgerald all had classrooms that performed similarly on their Benchmark exams: 

However, when the administrator observes the Expected vs Actual results, they can see that Jonathon Ingram’s classroom performed significantly better than the other three teachers:  

Similarly, viewing student results without the context of their expected scores can be misleading. An administrator viewing the following data would probably assume that Mckenzie Barrett and Jan Farmer performed similarly on the test: 

In actuality, however, Mckenzie Barrett far outperformed Jan Farmer: 

With the context of expected vs. actual data, a teacher or administrator gains a clear picture of the progress in a classroom rather than just the ability levels of a classroom. This clear picture of progress allows teachers or administrators to identify and investigate outliers who are either falling behind their expected performance or who are far above their expected performance.