ERB Insights Blog
Education is changing daily and ERB strives to keep our members up to date on what is happening that may impact your school and your students today, tomorrow, and in the future.
upcoming events
ERB Conference
This year our conference theme, Connections, focuses on the power of data insights to support the whole child. Over the course of three action-packed days, we’ll explore how students’ emotional states of mind, engagement with their classes, as well as sense of fairness and belonging, connect to their academic success […] read more
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Featured News
“Each child is a physical, mental and spiritual being, interlocked and intertwined, with each dimension significantly affecting the other two.” William Litterick More than 50 years ago, ERB President William Litterick wrote that assessments of learning must focus on “what children are rather than what they are not. … Each child is a physical, mental and spiritual being, interlocked and intertwined, with each dimension significantly affecting the other two.” Today we call this a whole child perspective, one that recognizes the connections between a student’s sense of self-worth, their sense of belonging in the school community, and the likelihood of […] read more
By Adrienne Hu and Glenn Milewski For the Spring 2023 reporting cycle, the rolling norm continues to use four consecutive years of data. CTP norms are typically updated annually for each reporting cycle (fall and spring). These “rolling norms” as they are often called, are obtained after gathering three years of data, and in the fourth year, deleting the earliest year and adding data from the most recent administration. During the pandemic, however, when many member schools suspended in-person testing, ERB “froze” the CTP norms. Instead of updating them with limited data from that unusual moment in history, ERB provided […] read more
Join ERB’s Member Services Directors for a series of virtual office hours to help you learn and maximize your use of ERB’s products and services. These full-length webinars will last 45-60 minutes, providing participants with the tools they need to maximize the use of our products and services to inform curriculum and instruction and support student learning and growth. Sessions will be recorded for future reference. Wed., January 18 11:30 am ET / 8:30 am PT ERB’s Conference is back! Connections: Previewing ERB’s Upcoming Conference and Why you should be there! Be sure to register for our January webinar to […] read more
Join ERB’s Member Services Directors for a series of virtual office hours to help you learn and maximize your use of ERB’s products and services. These full-length webinars will last 45-60 minutes, providing participants with the tools they need to maximize the use of our products and services to inform curriculum and instruction and support student learning and growth. Sessions will be recorded for future reference. Wed., September 14 12:00 pm ET / 9:00 am PT September Virtual Office Hours: Welcome Back to ERB! This session oriented new members/users to the various ERB portals, Member Profile, and Help resources and […] read more
Join ERB’s Member Services Directors for a series of mini webinars to help you learn and maximize your use of ERB’s products and services. Each mini webinar will last 15-20 minutes and introduce you to one of ERB’s products or services. Sessions will be recorded for future reference. Tues., August 30 12:00 pm ET / 9:00 am PT MSD Mini: SEL This mini webinar focused on ERB’s SEL Insights program! Wed., August 31 11:00 am ET / 8:00 am PT MSD Mini: ERB Writing This mini webinar focused on ERB’s Writing Practice (formerly known as WPP)! Thurs., September 1 12:00 […] read more
erb + test innovators
Students, parents, schools, and access organizations will benefit from ERB’s new offering, which focuses on test familiarization, anxiety reduction, confidence building, and learning resources.
New Updates to Milestones Norms for Fall 2022 Milestones is an interim assessment of reading and mathematics that complements the CTP. When it was first launched in the fall of 2020, ERB used CTP data to construct Milestones norms. This was appropriate given that Milestones and CTP share the same score scale and use very similar test specifications. After two years of administration, ERB determined that it collected sufficient data to construct norms based on actual Milestones test-takers. These norms better reflect students’ performance on Milestones and are more useful to members interpreting results. ERB will keep adding years to the Milestones norm […] read more
CTP Norms Fall 2022 As the 2022-2023 school year gets underway, we want to update you on the latest with CTP norms and explain how we developed the current CTP norms in relation to pre and post-pandemic data. CTP norms for the fall 2021 test administrations were frozen due to anomalies in the fall 2020 data (e.g., low volume, non-representative samples, and COVID disruptions). Norms were unfrozen in the fall of 2022 given: the desire for members to understand performance in relation to the pandemic context, and a rebound in test taking that occurred as members adapted to schooling during […] read more
What is PEG™? PEG, or Project Essay Grade, is the automated scoring system at the core of ERB Writing Practice. It was invented in the 1960s by Ellis Batten Page, a former high school English teacher, who spent “many long weekends sifting through stacks of papers wishing for some help.” His guiding principles? 1) the more we write, the better writer we become, and 2) computers can grade as reliably as their human counterparts (Page, 2003). The state of computers at the time of Page’s invention did not leave much room for automation, so PEG lay dormant until the mid-1980s. […] read more
An award-winning automated scoring algorithm. Project Essay Grade® (PEG®) software is an automated essay scoring solution based on more than 40 years of research by Dr. Ellis Batten Page, whose pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics has distinguished him as the leader of computer-based essay scoring. Using advanced, proven statistical techniques, PEG analyzes written prose, calculates measures that reflect the intrinsic characteristics of writing (fluency, diction, grammar, construction, etc.), and models the decisions of professional readers to produce scores that deliver unparalleled accuracy and reliability. PEG’s scoring results have been validated in more independent studies than all other […] read more
ERB Launches Writing Practice with new design, functionality, and enhanced features to help students improve their writing skills with instant, actionable feedback. A robust library of prompts and lessons saves educators time while providing students unlimited opportunities to practice writing. ERB announced today the availability of ERB Writing Practice, an online program designed to help students improve their writing skills through practice, feedback, and guided support backed by the industry’s most accurate automated scoring algorithm. ERB Writing Practice helps educators and families save valuable time while giving students immediate and individualized feedback and opportunities for growth. Why ERB Writing Practice? […] read more
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