| The Colorado Student Assessment Program, or CSAP, is the Colorado standardized testing program that measures student progress in reading, writing, and mathematics for all public schools in the state of Colorado. The scores vary across the state between districts, neighborhoods, and schools. Is there any pattern to this variation in scores? Is there one primary factor that explains this variation? At which scale are factors most significant?; This project uses GIS to map the CSAP results and to correlate CSAP scores with neighborhood demographic variables such as income, race, educational attainment, as well as school related variables such as teacher salary and percent free lunch. The hypothesis that school scores are influenced by the characteristics defining the neighborhoods in which the students live challenges the theory that educational success is independent of these social factors. The most explanatory variable used in the analyses was percent free lunch. The higher the percentage of students that qualify for free lunch in a school, the lower the average CSAP scores for that grade at all scales of analyses. The school scale provided the strongest correlations between the CSAP scores and percent free lunch. |
