Progress monitoring can give parents and teachers information that can help students learn more and learn faster. It can also help teachers teach more effectively and make better decisions about the type of instruction that will work best with individual students. In other words, student progress monitoring is a way of helping the student learn and the teacher teach.
How does progress monitoring work?
Student progress monitoring helps teachers evaluate how effective their instruction is, either for individual students or for the entire class. A teacher who uses progress monitoring works with the goals in the Individualized Education Program (IEP) and the state standards to develop goals that can be measured and tracked. These goals can then be used to divide what the student is expected to learn by the end of the year into shorter, measurable steps.
For example, a student may have the goal of reading a certain number of words per minute by the end of the year. Once the teacher sets the goal and begins instruction, then he or she measures the student's progress toward meeting the goal each week. All the tests have the same level of difficulty, so the weekly tests can reflect the student's rate of progress accurately. With each test, the teacher compares how much the student is expected to have learned to the student's actual rate of learning.
If the student is meeting or exceeding the expectation, the teacher continues to teach the student in the same way. If the student's performance on the measurement does not meet the expectation, then the teacher changes the teaching. The teacher might change the method being used, the amount of instructional time, the grouping arrangement, or some other aspect of teaching.
In this process, the teacher is looking for the type and amount of instruction that will enable the student to make enough progress toward meeting the goal. The measurements take from 1 to 5 minutes, so the student should not have the feeling of constantly being tested. In addition, since the teacher measures progress frequently -- usually once a week -- he or she can revise the instructional plan as soon as the student needs it, rather than waiting until a test or the state assessment shows that the student's instructional needs are not being met.
After each weekly measurement, the teacher notes the student's performance level and compares it to previous measurements and to expected rates of learning. The teacher tracks the measurements on a graph as a way of showing the success of both the teacher and the student.
How parents receive information
If a teacher or a school uses this type of student progress monitoring, parents may receive a letter describing the program and how the teacher will be working with their child. Or, it may be discussed at the child's IEP meeting. After that, parents should receive regular feedback from the teacher on how well their child is doing, perhaps with a copy of the graph itself and information on instructional changes. If parents do not receive the graph and instructional information, they can ask for it.
Adapted from the National Center on Student Progress Monitoring article ’What Student Progress Monitoring Means for your Child’ by Kathleen McLane.
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