Articles by Elena Diaz-Bilello

The Colorado Department of Education’s (CDE) Office of Learning Supports contracted with CADRE to support CDE’s efforts to improve school and district systems at the organizational level with the Colorado Multi-Tiered System of Supports (COMTSS). COMTSS is a framework for considering prevention-based approaches to improving student outcomes. The framework has...

In 2022-2024 CADRE researchers partnered with the Colorado Department of Education to evaluate a state grant pilot program. This program emerged from Colorado HB 19-1017, which provided pilot K-5 Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) grants to 14 schools. One central purpose of these grants was to ensure that school health professionals (SHPs)...

In this report, CADRE researchers share results from conducting a qualitative multi-site case study at three former low performing schools located in one school district that adopted locally motivated turnaround strategies and practices to maintain higher levels of student achievement over time. Two schools are former turnaround schools that participated in the Colorado Department of Education’s (CDE) Turnaround Network (TN), and one school did not participate in the network but used many of the tools and strategies provided to TN schools. The purpose of this multi-site case study was to identify the practices, and conditions supporting those practices, that these schools learned through partnership with the TN and continue to sustain through present day.

Much has been written about the importance of the Arts, particularly with respect to how exposure to arts programming can meet social emotional learning needs of students and enhance their well-being (Bowen & Kisida, 2019; Greene et al., 2018; Kisida et al., 2020). For this reason, education researchers highlight the...

This is an addendum to a report prepared for the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) by the Center for Assessment, Design, Research & Evaluation (CADRE) at CU Boulder (Shear et al., 2021). CDE requested an addendum to the 2021 CADRE report presenting similar descriptive analyses for schools that participated in the Connect for Success (CFS) program and providing initial descriptive analyses of academic outcomes for schools participating in two other Empowering Action for School Improvement (EASI) programs: The Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS) and Accountability Pathways Planning and Implementation (Pathways).

In this study, we provide a rich description of one academic coaching program and use a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the program’s effects on student outcomes. We investigate two research questions: 1) how does academic coaching influence key student outcomes? and 2) to what extent do these effects vary by amount of coaching received?

For this report, we analyzed longitudinal administrative data collected by the Colorado Department of Education to track the academic performance of schools. The analyses contained in this report focus on the set of schools receiving School Turnaround Network (STN) and School Turnaround Leadership Development (STLD) supports.

This document presents a set of classroom assessment principles intended as a resource for practitioners, especially school leaders and district and state policymakers. Together these principles articulate a shared vision for effective classroom assessment practices.

Link to Resource: Between-Year Stability of Growth Percentiles : Technical Brief #3 Authors: Benjamin R. Shear and Elena Diaz-Bilello The purpose of this research brief for the Colorado Department of Education Accountability & Data Analysis Unit is to examine the stability of year‐to‐year median growth percentiles by assessment content area...

Link to Resource: Growth Percentiles, Achievement & Demographics: Technical Brief #1 - 2019 Author: Benjamin R. Shear and Elena Diaz-Bilello The purpose of this research brief for the Colorado Department of Education Accountability & Data Analysis is to address to what extent are school‐level Median Growth Percentiles correlated with current...