Over the last year, a growing number of states, including New York, Florida, Ohio, Maryland and New Jersey, have enacted laws specifying that student achievement will comprise a percentage of teacher and principal evaluations. For classes where there are no state assessments, such as art or music or health, many states are turning to Student Learning Objectives (SLO) to measure student growth. As a result, schools and districts are now responsible for crunching the data for SLOs to determine if students achieved the academic goals set at the beginning of a course, and to determine an effectiveness rating for each teacher and school leader as part of their annual evaluations. Gathering, analyzing, and measuring all of this data is a complicated task. Done manually, the time requirement – and margin for errors – is huge. Which is why Performance Matters’ SLO Module tool is so timely and important. Using the SLO Module, educators can quickly access the target score and results from pre- and post-assessments for each student under each SLO. With the tool’s automatic calculations, they can see whether each student met the SLO, as well as the overall percentage of students achieving the SLO by class or by course. In addition, the SLO Module ensures accurate mathematical calculations, which principals can use to group teachers into the appropriate ratings category — e.g. highly effective, effective, or ineffective — on the SLO portion of their evaluations. Check it out.