HARRISBURG -- In a handful of districts around the state, educators have latched onto a new statistical method of analyzing standardized test scores to track their students' annual progress toward meeting academic standards.

In the fall of 2002, the state Department of Education began a "value-added assessment" pilot program, which is intended to show how students and teachers have contributed to academic achievement gains, with about 30 school districts. All of Pennsylvania's 501 school districts will be required to participate in the program beginning in the 2005-06 school year.

Superintendents from two of the participating districts told the Senate Education Committee yesterday that the program is allowing them to spot testing trends better over time and use the data to determine where teachers might need extra help in the classroom. The state currently uses standardized tests to measure the academic achievement of schools at a point in time, but not individual student progress.

"We felt that longitudinal look at how students were doing was going to add to how we could get [them] to achieve even more," said Stephen A. Iovino, superintendent of the Warwick School District in Lancaster County.

The concept was first implemented statewide in Tennessee more than a decade ago, based on research by William Sanders, a former University of Tennessee statistician. Ohio lawmakers enacted a measure last spring to require all of its districts to conduct value-added assessments within two years, and more than 300 districts in 21 states now perform such analysis, Sanders said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Sanders is now a research fellow with the University of North Carolina system and manager of value-added assessment and research for SAS Institute Inc. in Cary, N.C. He said that as he tracked progress of Tennessee's 137 school districts over the years, he found the greatest improvements in districts that most consistently used the test measurements to improve instruction.

"For districts in which local leadership has had a consistent and assertive faculty and staff development program, it is old hat and it is a tool like chalk and erasers. Other districts, I'm sad to say, have done nothing with it," Sanders said.

In Pennsylvania, both Iovino and Sharon Kirk, superintendent of the DuBois Area School District in Clearfield County, are measuring student gains in math and reading based on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test, which is given in grades three, five, eight and 11, plus other standardized tests they administer in other grades.

In Warwick, school officials found that on the 2001 math test for eighth-graders, both the lowest-performing and highest-performing students were not making nearly as much progress as students considered to be average, Iovino said.

"The reason for that was we were teaching toward the middle," he said. "If we really want to move our students ... into the proficient or advanced range, we have a game plan to work with those two levels" of low- and high-scoring students.

In DuBois, school officials have focused on developing individualized education plans for all middle school students to address each child's strengths and weaknesses, Kirk said.

"In math, they could be at the top level, but maybe they're struggling with their writing skills," she said. "That takes a lot of work and dedication, though."

Schools involved in the pilot program do not use the value-added analyses to determine whether teachers should receive bonuses for good performance or penalties for poor performance, and the Pennsylvania Education Association is hoping it will remain that way.

"The value-added assessment should not be linked to teachers' compensation simply because there are too many variables affecting students' performance," said PSEA spokesman Wythe Keever. "Teachers can't control every factor that goes into learning."