Integrated Acceleration System
A project to assess the validity of the integrated acceleration system.
The project is a comprehensive research study to provide validity evidence for the Integrated Acceleration System (IAS), a multi-faceted assessment tool. The IAS is designed to improve the identification of high-ability youth by moving beyond traditional single-score metrics. It achieves this by gathering and synthesizing a broad range of evidence related to a student’s cognitive ability, academic achievement, and social-emotional development.
The IAS aims to create a holistic and nuanced profile of each student. By integrating these three key areas, the system provides a more accurate and defensible basis for making significant educational placement decisions, specifically for whole-grade acceleration. The ultimate goal of the IAS is to produce a readiness score or indicator that synthesizes the collective evidence to determine a student’s readiness for accelerated academic offerings.
Key Research Questions and Methodology
This study will focus on several critical aspects of validity evidence. First, we will evaluate the internal consistency reliability of the IAS to ensure that its components are consistently measuring the intended constructs. We will also examine the unique and interrelated contributions of each component of the IAS (ability, achievement, and social-emotional development) to the final readiness score. This analysis will determine the relative importance and necessity of each element in the overall evaluation process.
The findings from this initial research will be crucial for refining the IAS and establishing it as a fair, equitable, and evidence-based tool for identifying and supporting high-ability learners.
Future Research Directions
A future phase of this research will focus on predictive validity. We will collect and analyze longitudinal data to evaluate how effectively the IAS’s recommendations predict the academic and social-emotional outcomes of students who were recommended for and underwent whole-grade acceleration. This will provide essential long-term evidence of the system’s effectiveness and its ability to support student success.