Student Growth

Student Growth is the measure of students' academic progress from one year to the next. The goal for all students is to be on grade level.  How much growth students are experiencing determines whether they are on track to reach grade-level standards.  

Annual GrowtH

Students improve their skills incrementally every year, which is known as annual growth.  For students who start the school year performing on grade level, annual growth will be sufficient to reach that year's learning goals.  In most programs, this is referred to as average growth.  

Catch up Growth

The term for the improvements needed by students who start out far behind is, accordingly, "catch up growth." This refers to the reality that when a student starts out behind other students, he or she will need to learn at a faster rate than classmates to catch up.  For students who start out below grade level, both annual growth and catch up growth are needed in order to catch up to grade level.  Otherwise, the student will become farther behind each school year.  So, if a student who starts out below expectations improves his or her skills at the same pace as typically achieving students, gains will be made, but the student will still be behind others because his or her starting point was significantly lower than other students.  In most programs, students would need to be in above average, well above average or stretch growth. 

Set goals for achieving catch up growth

Knowing that average growth is not enough, the teacher must set goals for the student to achieve regularly throughout the school year.  To collect data without reference to a specific goal, there's no way to know whether a student is making adequate improvements.  

Two important key points when setting goals: 

#1 Goals should be ambitious but realistic- The most important step in helping students to catch up is to use ambitious learning goals.  Ambitious goals are those that result in a student making and sustaining learning gains that are bigger than other students' gains.  While we want goals to be ambitious, they should also be attainable.  If a goal is too easy, it won't help a student to catch up.  But over-ambitious goals may be impossible to attain and will set students up for frustration and failure.  

#2 Goals should be based on research and created using effective tools- There is an extensive body of research on the importance of goal setting and how goal setting should be approached and implemented to be successful.  Use the data from the BOY assessment to determine the rate of improvement needed.  The growth measure should always be above average.  One growth measure per group of students will not result in "catch up".  Remember the same growth percentile doesn't mean the same growth.  

When Planning/Evaluating Growth in Your students- You must ask yourself- Is that Progress Sufficient to get (or keep) that student to grade level?