CELApro Growth
General Questions
What is CELApro?
CELApro is a test, a part of Colorado's state mandated assessment system for K-12 public school students. CELApro is administered every year to all students identified by Local Educational Agencies as non-English proficient (NEP) or limited English proficient (LEP). CELApro measures English learners' English language proficiency in the four domains of reading, writing, speaking and listening, and these scores plus the overall score can help determine the kinds of English language support services students may need in school.
Return to Top
Why calculate growth in English proficiency?
The Colorado Department of Education has for the first time applied the Colorado Growth Model method to CELApro data in order to describe student progress in attaining English proficiency. In calculating a growth model, we are trying to answer two questions:
- How much growth is each student making?
- Is that enough growth to get him or her to proficiency in a reasonable amount of time?
These are the same questions we already ask when we calculate growth on the state's assessments in reading, writing and mathematics. In the case of CELApro data, the answers tell us about progress toward English language proficiency, rather than toward proficiency in academic content. However, the same Colorado Growth Model can be used for both of these purposes because it can handle many different kinds of data.
The first question is answered directly by the output of the Colorado Growth Model. The second question requires the additional calculation of Adequate Growth, explained briefly in another question within this set of FAQs.
Return to Top
How do we interpret growth on CELApro?
Although the tests have very distinct purposes, growth for CELApro is interpreted in a similar way as growth for CSAP reading, writing and math. There is already a lot of interpretation information available for CSAP growth. This page provides some help in interpreting growth percentiles, particularly through the private student growth FAQs and the video entitled Introducing Colorado's Growth Model.
Return to Top
Where are the CELApro growth results available?
Registered district users can log into the CEDAR data reporting system at CDE and download their student-level CELApro growth results. In CEDAR, the data are available as "flat files" (Excel spreadsheets with every student's results). The files include student growth percentile calculations for the 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 administrations of CELApro.
Access to student-level data is limited to educators who have a need for such data. For permission to access to the student-level data for your district, please contact your local school district's Local Access Manager (LAM) and request access to CDE's CEDAR system through this link. CDE does not directly grant access to this system to either district- or school-level users - districts must add, administer, and remove users themselves.
CELApro growth data are available only to district-level CEDAR users - there is no access for school-level users. School leaders that need access to these data should contact their district central offices for such access.
Return to Top
What is Adequate Growth for English proficiency?
CELApro Growth describes how a student is progressing toward English language proficiency compared to his/her peers - students that had similar score histories in the same grades. Adequate Growth reflects the percentile at which a student needs to perform each year in order to attain a higher level of proficiency within a specified time horizon. Comparisons between the two show if a student's growth is enough to get him or her there in time. In other words, was the growth that a student demonstrated enough to get him/her to the target level of proficiency? Performing this calculation requires some additional information beyond just the amount of growth; it also requires knowing what the target level of proficiency is, as well as how much time is allotted to reach it.
Along these lines, the data suggested that it takes more than three years for the great majority of early English learners to get to Level 5, the state-designated proficient level on CELApro. Therefore Adequate Growth on CELApro is calculated slightly differently from how it is on the CSAP/TCAP. Instead of specifying proficiency within three years or by tenth grade, for CELApro the proficiency target is the next-higher proficiency level, as shown in the following table:
| Current Proficiency Level |
Desired Proficiency Level |
Time Allowed |
| 1 |
2 |
1 year |
| 2 |
3 |
1 year |
| 3 |
4 |
2 years |
| 4 |
5 |
2 years |
Return to Top
Will CELApro growth appear in the bubble plots on Schoolview?
No, the way that scores and proficiency levels work in CELApro is so different that putting them in bubble plots would not really make sense. There will likely be some visual display of the data at a future time.
Return to Top
Is CELApro growth used in the state Performance Frameworks?
Yes, growth in English language proficiency was included in the state's school and district performance frameworks beginning in the fall of 2012, under Academic Growth. It gets fewer points than the other subject areas, however.
Return to Top
How much weight will English Proficiency growth have on the performance frameworks?
Reading, Writing, and Math growth each get four points under the Academic Growth indicator. English proficiency growth will get two points, so the total number of possible points increases from 12 to 14.
Return to Top
Is CELApro growth used in calculating AMAOs for No Child Left Behind?
Yes, Colorado received approval from the federal government to do this in the spring of 2012. The following is a summary of how AMAOs are now calculated:
- Proposed AMAO 1: CELApro growth (MGP and AGP)
- DPF rating of Meets or Exceeds state expectations on Academic Growth: English Language Proficiency
- AMAO 2: No change in measure (percentage of students scoring at level 5 on CELApro, with the target increased to 7%)
- AMAO 3: Aggregation of:
- reading, writing and math academic growth rating for ELs
- disaggregated graduation rate for ELs
Return to Top
What will happen when the assessment used for English Language proficiency changes?
The Colorado Growth Model can easily handle data from different assessments, as long as the assessments measure the same thing. When Colorado switches to a new English proficiency instrument, research will be conducted to determine if it is appropriate to calculate growth between the old and new administrations. If the contents of the two tests proved to be quite different, then it would be necessary to wait for two years of data on the same instrument to accumulate until growth calculations could again be used, so there would be a one-year gap in growth data.
Return to Top
Was growth calculated on the language domains separately, or on the overall scores from CELApro?
Research showed that specific language domain results were not always reliable enough to base growth calculations on, so growth scores are only available for overall scores on CELApro.
Return to Top
How are CELApro growth calculations related to the regular growth calculations?
There are substantial differences between CSAP/TCAP and CELApro. As shown in the table below, they test different content, on a different schedule, in different grades, and have a different system of achievement levels. The most significant difference is that, once students reach the proficient level on CELApro, they no longer take the test, so the focus in the data is always on students who are moving up to higher levels of proficiency, and not on the overall picture of proficiency across all ELLs.
The table below presents a summary comparison of these two tests.
Return to Top
What are the scores needed to achieve the various proficiency levels on CELApro?
Those cut scores depend on grade, and are presented in the table below:
Return to Top