Introduction

This section will give you a better understanding of Academic Return on Investment (ROI) and its applications

Academic ROI Background

The application of effect size for growth inferences is the core of understanding academic ROI.  Once effect size is established for each student ECRA aggregates it to analyze programs, interventions, grade levels, buildings, and district and compare it to research-based thresholds. The growth data are color coded for ease of interpretation. Green means growth is consistent with historical norms, thus categorized as “expected”. Low growth categories are yellow or red, indicating that growth is significantly lower than expected and lower than the local norms have shown in the past. Blue growth provides evidence that students have grown significantly higher than historical trends in the district.

Once the effect sizes are established for individual students and aggregated for the district, a number of advanced analytics become available to school and district leaders.  The measurement and analysis of instruction and programming from the classroom level up to the school and district means that that the instructional effect of curriculum, interventions and programming can be obtained in the form of the academic return on investment.

Academic ROI Explained

Academic Return on Investment (Academic ROI) quantifies the impact of an investment (i.e. instruction, intervention, and/or program) on student growth above and beyond growth that would have happened under regular or normal circumstances.  It is the answer for understanding how a student grows with a particular program versus how a student would grow without that program (see below).

Academic ROI Applied

Growth effect sizes can be used to evaluate the Academic Return on Investment (ROI) if districts and schools are tracking the programs or interventions students are in. ECRA can also calculate effect sizes for various equity initiatives. Knowing the impact each program is having on student learning will provide better visibility into the ROI and help to allocate funding & resources more effectively.  The samples below are real examples of programs that clients evaluated using ECRA’s predictive analytics.