A Parent’s Guide to Progress Monitoring at Home - Page 2

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:

1. The child is responding to the intervention, and the program should continue until the child meets grade level performance targets.
   
   
2. The child is meeting grade level targets, and can be placed in the general education class, with continued monitoring support.
   
   
3. 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.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.