What Is Scientifically - Based Research on Progress Monitoring ?

When teachers use systematic progress monitoring to track their students progress in reading, mathematics, or spelling, they are better able to identify students in need of additional or different forms of instruction, they design stronger instructional programs, and their students achieve better. This document first describes progress monitoring procedures for which experimental evidence demonstrates these effects. Then, an overview of the research is presented. Introduction. Progress monitoring is when teachers assess students’ academic performance on a regular basis (weekly or monthly) for two purposes: to determine whether children are profiting appropriately from the typical instructional program and to build more effective programs for the children who benefit inadequately from typical instruction. This document describes research on progress monitoring in the areas of reading, spelling, and mathematics at grades 1-6. Experimental research, which documents how teachers can use progress monitoring to enhance student progress, is available for one form of progress monitoring: Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM). More than 200 empirical studies published in peer-review journals (a) provide evidence of CBM’s reliability and validity for assessing the development of competence in reading, spelling, and mathematics and (b) document CBM’s capacity to help teachers improve student outcomes at the elementary grades. Most classroom assessment relies on mastery measurement. With mastery measurement, teachers test for mastery of a single skill and, after mastery is demonstrated, they assess mastery of the next skill in a sequence. So, at different times of the school year, different skills are assessed. Because the nature and difficulty of the tests keep changing with successive mastery, test scores from different times of the school cannot be compared (e.g., scores earned in September cannot be compared to scores earned in November or February or May). This makes it impossible to quantify or describe rates of progress. Furthermore, mastery measurement has unknown reliability and validity, and it fails to provide information about whether students are maintaining the previously mastered skills. CBM avoids these problems because, instead of measuring mastery of a series of single short-term objectives, each CBM test assesses all the different skills covered in the annual curriculum. CBM samples the many skills in the annual curriculum in such a way that each weekly test is an alternate form (with different test items, but of equivalent difficulty). So, in September, a CBM mathematics test assesses all of the computation, money, graphs/charts, and problem-solving skills to be covered during the entire year. In November or February or May, the CBM test samples the annual What Is Scientifically-Based Research on Progress Monitoring? Lynn S. Fuchs and Douglas Fuchs National Center on Student Progress Monitoring Providing information and technical assistance to implement progress monitoring for students in the elementary grades. 1000 Thomas Jefferson ~ Washington, DC 20007