A Parent's Guide | Progress Monitoring at Home

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With increasing frequency, schools across the country are using a Response-to-Intervention (RTI) or multi-tiered system of instructional support. These instructional approaches rely on the use of progress monitoring tools to determine whether children are making adequate progress. Progress monitoring allows us to determine much sooner which children are at risk for not meeting grade-level targets, allows us to determine whether children receiving intervention support are making adequate progress, and allows us to more closely match the instructional support to the needs of the individual child based on his response.

It is important for you to understand the essential components of the instructional approach used by your child’s school and the roles they can play in supporting your child’s success. One critical component is how the school will monitor your child’s progress. Progress monitoring is a process that is used to help determine whether a student is responding to the instructional program, whether that student may need more intensive interventions, or whether that student should be referred for a comprehensive evaluation to determine the presence of an LD.

Progress monitoring is typically conducted by the classroom teacher. Depending on the school’s requirements and the student’s needs, a teacher might monitor progress weekly, every other week, or monthly. Progress monitoring results are most often used to guide instruction in the class. If a child is not making much progress, that is an indication that something about the instruction may need some adjustment to better meet that student’s needs. Ideally, teachers will communicate with parents about their child’s progress and provide recommendations for how parents can support their child’s progress at home.

In some cases, parents might consider using progress monitoring tools at home. For example, you might:

Have concerns about the methods for testing and monitoring progress in use at your child’s school.
Not get regular reports from school.
Want to be more involved in monitoring your child’s progress.
Need information about your child’s progress if you have concerns but there’s no formal IEP or 504 plan in place.
Progress monitor over the summer or winter breaks to help your child stay on track with the progress they’ve made during the school year.

If you have these concerns or others, understanding how progress monitoring works will be very helpful in supporting your child. In this guide, you’ll learn what progress monitoring tells you about your child’s progress, and how to begin progress monitoring in reading.

What does progress monitoring tell us?

The reading progress monitoring tool described in this article is what is called a General Outcome Measure (GOM). Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) is a general outcome measure that gives a good indication of a child’s general reading ability. General outcome measures are different than a classroom test — classroom tests generally tell us whether a child has learned something the teacher just taught. General outcome measures are like medical screenings — temperature, pulse, and blood pressure give us overall indications of a person’s health. Similarly, a General Outcome Measure gives us an overall indication of a student’s growth and performance in reading.

In reading, progress monitoring measures are created by taking a variety of reading passages — both fiction and non-fiction, and alternating the passages used each week to measure a child’s oral reading fluency. Because the passages are of equal difficulty, we can compare a child’s performance on one measure to the next. This is what allows us to monitor growth in reading performance in a meaningful way.

Performance on oral reading fluency measures is typically compared to national norms. National norms are simply a collection of performances from thousands of students at a particular grade level that are then rank ordered and put onto the normal distribution. Usually, the performance of students falling at the average, or 50^thpercentile, is used as the target performance level for students receiving intervention.

A Typical Progress Monitoring Graph

A student’s performance on each of their oral reading fluency measures is plotted to create a visual display (graph) of their growth. Based on the graph, a teacher can make one of three decisions:

The child is responding to the intervention, and the program should continue until the child meets grade level performance targets.
The child is meeting grade level targets, and can be placed in the general education class, with continued monitoring support.
The child is not responding and the teacher should consider an instructional change to better meet the child’s needs.

Looking at the graph below, the teacher might decide to make a teaching change. This third grade student appears to only have improved his reading rate by a few words over a semester. A more intensive instructional program might help this child make better gains in his reading.

How did we come to this conclusion? Let’s look at the elements of the graph and what they tell us.

The y axis labeled #1 is simply the way in which the performance target is measured. It is a measure of how many words a child reads correctly in one minute given a grade level reading passage.
The blue line, labeled #2 represents the performance level the student is trying to meet by the end of the monitoring period. This graph reflects one school term – in this case we focused on winter, and the blue benchmark line is the goal we are hoping to meet by spring. For third graders, the target ORF is 110 by spring.
For students who are struggling, progress monitoring data is ideally collected each week and plotted. The blue diamonds represent the child’s performance on each measure collected.
The red line is called the trendline. The trend line shows the straight line performance through the students’ individual ORF scores. In this graph, we see that the trendline is not moving close enough to the benchmark to allow the student to meet grade level standards. When the trendline does not move the student closer to the desired performance level (#2), we can conclude that the student is not making adequate progress.

For each one of these components of the progress monitoring graph, there are a number of guides and resources that inform every step of the process. Before we explain how we determined the target ORF level for a third grader in spring, let’s first take a closer look at John Doe’s performance.

John Doe started this term with an ORF of 64. The third grade performance benchmark for this time period is 77. His performance puts him at risk for not meeting grade level performance targets. In spring, the performance benchmark is 110, but based on his rate of progress, he will not be able to meet this benchmark, and will actually fall further behind his grade level peers. His teacher should consider an instructional change to better meet his learning needs. This might be as simple as increasing the intensity of the instruction (e.g., work with him more often, for longer periods of time, in a smaller group).

Why progress monitor at home?

There are several reasons why you might want to use progress monitoring tools at home — here are a few:

You might want to maintain continuity of your child’s program during school breaks or summer vacations
If your child is exited from intervention but you are still concerned about her progress.
There are a number of tools and resources that you can easily access from your personal computer
If you home school your child and you’d like to know whether his reading is on track.

How can I progress monitor at home?If you plan to progress monitor at home, it will be important to talk to your child about why you are doing it. You should share with your child that you want to be sure that he or she is learning to read well, and you should involve your child in setting ambitious but achievable short-term goals. Many children enjoy being involved in charting their progress and in setting and working towards goals.

There are a number of resources available to get started with progress monitoring. Here are some that are available at no cost — these may or may not be the same tools used at your child’s school, but they will likely be very similar. If you are using tools different than those used at your child’s school, talk to your child’s teacher about the differences between the systems you are using.

Materials to Get Started

A way to chart and graph your data. One of the easiest systems to use is CBM Focus . There are a number of support tools on the website that provide guidance on how to use the system. Another easy-to-use graphing system is available at Intervention Central. This site features pre-formatted Excel spreadsheets.
Grade level passages. If you are monitoring progress over the summer, you may want to use the grade level that your child will enter in fall. It is best to use passages that have been standardized — this helps ensure that the passages are essentially equivalent. You can download free passages from a number of websites, most of which will require you to register an email and address to access. Two commonly used sites:
- Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy System (DIBELS)
- Easy CBM
Norms for comparison. National norms are usually the best comparison because they are based on the largest number of students. You will need to use the norms for the set of passages you downloaded. You should use the goals associated with those students at “low risk.” The norms for DIBELS and Easy CBM are available when you register for those sites.
A timer. A stop watch or timer that will allow you to accurately time in one minute intervals.

Procedures

Progress monitoring is not complex, but it is important to follow a step-by-step process to ensure accuracy.

Establish a baseline. A baseline is the starting point of your child’s reading performance. You establish a baseline measure by collecting performance data on the first progress monitoring session. Best practice is to have your child complete three measures and then to take the median score as the baseline. The median score is the one in the middle when you rank order the scores. If for example, you administer three measures and your child’s performance is a 43, a 57 and a 52, the median score is 52, and that is your child’s baseline score.
Establish a performance goal. This is typically done by selecting the performance level at the next benchmark time. For example, if you start progress monitoring at the end of a school year, you may want to monitor progress until the beginning of the following school year, so you would use the fall benchmark for that grade.
Administer the passages. DIBELS and Easy CBM both provide directions for how to administer the reading passages. In general, the directions will have you show the child the student version of the passage, while you follow along with the teacher passage.
Score the passages. To score a passage, you make two lines at the end of the last word the student read when the one-minute timer ended. The child’s words read correct per minute is determined by taking the Total Words Read – Errors = Words Read Correct.
Test weekly. Each week you will administer one passage and plot your child’s performance. If you use one of the preformatted spreadsheets, the progress monitoring graph will be automatically generated.
Monitor the trendline. As the progress monitoring graph is generated, you will be able to see the trendline of your child’s performance. As the trendline is generated, you will compare the trendline to the goal. If your child’s trend is not on a trajectory to meet the performance goal you’ve set, you will want to consider talking with your child’s teacher about a change to whatever instruction your child is receiving.

Interpreting Your Child’s Performance

Remember that progress monitoring is just one tool to help determine whether a student is generally on track for meeting reading performance goals. Oral reading fluency is an indicator of whether a child is on track, but remember that the goal is not to simply train your child to read faster. More fluent reading is achieved by increasing their ability to decode words, increasing their vocabulary, and having your child read more.

Discuss how to coordinate and/or share results with your child’s teacher; to approach at-home monitoring in the spirit of partnership with the teacher.

Your child’s progress will be the result of both in-school instruction and at home support. One of the best ways to improve reading is to read more often, and that is best supported at home. If you are concerned about your child’s reading performance and progress, you should contact your child’s teacher, or other education professional. If your child consistently does not make progress even when provided appropriate reading intervention, you might consider requesting an evaluation to determine why your child is not learning to read.

Evelyn S. Johnson, Ed.D. is Professor of Special Education, Boise State University, and Executive Director of Lee Pesky Learning Center. She received her Doctor of Education from the University of Washington, and worked as a research associate for the National Research Center on Learning Disabilities under the direction of Don Deshler and Daryl Mellard. Evelyn's research is focused on the identification of learning disabilities, improving screening procedures to identify students at risk for learning disabilities, response-to-intervention implementation, and special education teacher preparation and evaluation. Her work has been supported by grants from the Office of Special Education Programs, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Idaho State Department of Education.