The objective of this paper is to present value-added calculation methods that were applied to determine whether online schools performed at the same or different levels relative to standardized testing. This study includes information on how we approached our value added model development and the results for 32 online public high schools in California. Student level California Standards Test results in English Language Arts and Mathematics for over 5,000 online students were analyzed. Mean value added metrics for each school were calculated for 8 courses held during the 2010-2011 academic year. We found that schools of distinction existed in 7 of the 8 course categories.
This document was originally published in the Journal of Educational Technology & Society by International Forum of Educational Technology & Society. This work is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. Details regarding the use of this work can be found at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
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