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How Impacts Are Created

An impact is how TKG Analytics represents an accountability result - a single state measure (proficiency, growth, and the rest) rolled up for a teacher, school, or district. Impacts are the core of educator accountability and student-progress tracking: they turn the scores you upload into the results the state model produces, and let a district see where every teacher, school, and grade stands throughout the year. This page explains where impacts come from, who receives one, and which scores feed them. For what each measure inside an impact means, see Impact Components.

From Scores to Impacts

Impacts are built automatically from the scores you upload - you do not create them by hand:

  1. Scores arrive. Assessment files (benchmarks, state MAAP, SLAIF) and your SIS roster are uploaded and processed.
  2. Scores are matched. Each score is tied to the student, and through the student's enrollments to a teacher, a school, and a course period.
  3. Scores roll up. TKG Analytics aggregates the matched scores into an impact for each owner, assessment, and score type.

Impacts are rebuilt by a job after files upload. Re-running it updates the same impact in place rather than creating duplicates, so re-importing is always safe.

When Impacts Change Without a Rebuild

District and school impacts also use your Readiness Standards: the graduation, acceleration, and college and career readiness rates. When those rates change, TKG Analytics updates the district and school impacts that use them right away, without re-importing any scores. This happens when:

  • You edit a readiness standard. Saving new rates updates that year's district and school impacts immediately.
  • Your MDE impact file is uploaded. The upload replaces last year's rates with the official ones, which updates last year's district and school impacts. It then carries those official rates forward as this year's starting rates, but only for this year's readiness standards that nobody has edited. Rates you have set for this year are kept.

Teacher impacts do not use readiness standards, so they do not change. Scores are not touched, and nothing needs to be re-imported: the new rates are already applied.

Who Gets an Impact

An impact is computed for three kinds of owner:

  • Teachers - based on their course-period enrollments. A teacher's impact reflects the students they taught in the tested subject and period.
  • Schools - based on enrollment (current or test-time, depending on the measure). A split school or non-traditional high school produces separate non-EOC and EOC impacts plus a combined main rollup.
  • Districts - the aggregate across schools, for district-level analysis and planning.

The same score can land in a teacher, a school, and a district impact at once; the owner determines how it is grouped and filtered.

Teachers with more than one role

A teacher can receive more than one impact for the same period, one for each role they hold:

  • A Gifted course gives a Gifted impact, built from the gifted students enrolled in that course.
  • A SPED (Inclusion) course gives an Inclusion impact, built from the special-education students enrolled in that course, in the subjects set for the teacher on Custom Teachers.
  • A MAAP, Feeder, or K-2 course gives the teacher's regular impacts (MAAP, Feeder, K-2, and Compacted), built from the students they teach in those courses.

A teacher with no course in the period gets the regular impacts.

So a teacher who teaches a gifted class and a 4th grade English class has both a Gifted impact and a MAAP impact, and each one counts only its own students. A teacher whose only course is Gifted or Inclusion has only that impact. See Score Type Assignment for which courses map to which type.

Earlier years

Before this was corrected, a teacher who held a Gifted or Inclusion course received only that impact, even if they also taught a regular course. Impacts from those earlier periods were not rebuilt, so an earlier year may show only a Gifted or Inclusion impact for such a teacher.

Once such a teacher has a MAAP impact, their historical performance page opens on MAAP, which may show a single period. Their earlier Gifted or Inclusion results are still there: choose Gifted or Inclusion from the score type menu at the top of the page.

What Scores Count

Impacts draw on every score type in the Mississippi model:

Which of these applies depends on the student, the grade, and the subject - the platform selects the right one automatically.

Quarters and Benchmarks Are Not the Same

A quarter (nine-week period) is a window of the school year - Q1 through Q4, plus Q99 for the spring state (MAAP) window. A benchmark is a specific interim exam, given during a quarter. They are easy to confuse because Benchmark 1 is given in Quarter 1, but a quarter is a time period and a benchmark is an assessment.

This distinction matters most on Score Filters. A filter's period columns mark when a student received a support - which nine-week window - not which benchmark they took. Tagging a student under the first period means "during the first nine weeks," not "Benchmark 1."

When Benchmark 4 Uses Benchmark 3 Results

Benchmarks 1 through 3 are usually given to every tested grade, so each one describes your whole school or district. Benchmark 4 is different. Most districts give it only to some grades, most often high school courses, so on its own it does not cover every student. Some districts do not give it at all.

So that a Benchmark 4 result still describes the whole school or district, TKG Analytics fills in the students who have no Benchmark 4 result with their Benchmark 3 result. This happens in two places:

  • A split school's main impact. When a split school has no Benchmark 4 result for its non-EOC grades, its Benchmark 4 main impact combines the EOC grades' Benchmark 4 result with the non-EOC grades' Benchmark 3 result. The rarer reverse case, EOC grades with no Benchmark 4 result, works the same way.
  • Your district's MAAP impact. Your district's Benchmark 4 MAAP impact combines each school's latest result: Benchmark 4 where the school has one, and Benchmark 3 where it does not, including the non-EOC grades of a split school.

Only these two are filled in. Every other Benchmark 4 impact, including your district's and schools' other score types such as SPED and EL, counts only the students who took Benchmark 4.

Why the Benchmark 4 list can show fewer students

The list of scores on a Benchmark 4 page shows only the scores taken on Benchmark 4. Students filled in from Benchmark 3 are counted in the Benchmark 4 impact but listed on the Benchmark 3 page, with the scores they actually took. That is why a Benchmark 4 impact can count more students, or more students in its lowest 25%, than the list beneath it shows. Nothing is miscounted: the impact and the list are describing different groups of students.

When this applies, a note above the impact says which students came from Benchmark 3 (for your district, how many schools) and links to the Benchmark 3 page where they are listed. The note uses the names your district gave its benchmarks. If every student in your school or district took Benchmark 4, nothing is filled in and no note appears.

Retained and Skipped Students

A retained student (repeating a grade) has their growth measured against their previous year's score in the grade they are repeating - for example, a retained 4th grader grows from their prior 4th grade assessment. This applies in grades 1 through 8, and it falls out of the growth calculation automatically: growth always compares a student to their own prior-year result, so there is no separate retainer flag.

Retained and grade-skipping students are also grouped for the Low-Performing Students (LPS) subgroup by their prior-year scale score rather than their current grade, so every eligible student is compared to peers with similar prior performance. See Grade Skippers and Retained Students for the growth rule, the cohort bands, and the school/teacher attribution rules.

What Each Impact Measures

Once an impact is built, it breaks into the components the state adds together for a rating - proficiency, growth (all students and lowest 25%), graduation rate, the Readiness Index, English Language Progress, and Third Grade Reading. Each is defined, with its point weight, in Impact Components.

To see every score type's impact at once, use All Impacts; to see them split by grade, use Grade Impacts; for the printable summary, see Report Cards.

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