Colorado Growth Model
The Colorado Growth Model provides a common understanding of how individual students and groups of students progress from year to year toward state standards based on where each individual student begins.
The model focuses attention on maximizing student progress over time and reveals where, and among which students, the strongest growth is happening and where it is not.
The Colorado Growth Model shines a spotlight on the state’s most effective schools and districts—those that produce the highest sustained rates of growth in student progress. These schools and districts may or may not be districts or schools with the highest test scores every year.
Colorado developed the model to answer three essential questions about student, school and district performance:
- What is the growth rate of a student, a school and a district?
- What should be the growth rate for a student to reach a desired level of achievement within a period of time?
- What are the highest sustained growth rates that exist today and under what conditions could they improve?
To answer these questions, the Colorado Growth Model uses a common measure to describe how much growth each student makes and how much growth is needed to reach state standards. In doing so, it provides a complete history of all students’ individual-level test scores from the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP). The model depicts academic growth in a user-friendly and interactive display that relates normative information about student progress toward the criteria of reaching different state proficiency levels.
If you have questions, please email growth.questions@cde.state.co.us