Chapter 9: Making Progress with Growth Models in Education: Utility for School Improvement

Growth models have intuitive appeal in education. The heart of the educational endeavor is learning, and learning can be conceptualized as desired growth or change in knowledge, skills, and abilities. Not only is individual student growth a fundamental goal of education, but both policy makers and practitioners expect continuous improvement in the professional practice of education. The modeling of growth then is an essential key for evaluating improvements in a professional process of individual student growth. If students are already growing and schools and systems of schools are continuously changing, how else can we validate that changes made to an educational system are improving upon that process of student growth (Day, et al., 2010)?