Assessment informs parents, students, school staff, community members, and policy makers of just how well students are doing. When appropriately applied, it can also help teachers make decisions about what strategies to use to address the needs of their students with disabilities. When teachers use information collected regularly within their own classrooms, they are able to make adjustments to their instruction and help students succeed.
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Juan is a 9 year-old boy from El Salvador who has lived in the United States since he was 3. At the age of 6, he was identified as having a learning disability.
Juan has been in a fully inclusive classroom since he began school. While Juan has never been a good student, the death of his father two years ago has had an enormous impact on his schoolwork. Since then, he's had a very hard time focusing in school, which has led him to fall even further behind in his academics.
Juan's IEP team is worried, but suspects that they may not have an accurate picture of what Juan knows and can do. He may struggle with memory and reading, but he can tell you all about the movie or the sports game he saw last weekend. This leads the IEP team (which includes school personnel directly involved with Juan and Juan's mother) to consider how the testing situation might be adjusted to better support Juan in demonstrating his learning. They carefully review what they see as causing Juan trouble. They talk about his tendency to get frustrated when he has to sit and work on a task for extended periods of time and how quickly he turns to socializing with friends. He also gets confused when he has to process and organize a lot of text.
When the year began, Juan could only remember the end of a story and recognize 20 sight words. Although his teachers focused instruction on reading of sight words and comprehension skills in the next months, Juan appeared to be making little progress. This changed after the IEP team met and decided on accommodations that would better address Juan's instructional needs and help him show what he really knows when being assessed. Last month, his sight vocabulary was measured at 50 words, and he could retell the entire story he read.
Both Juan and his mother talk about how much he enjoys his weekly reading assessments. He tells his teachers that he is having fun, and his mother says that he enjoys reading with his friends. He feels successful and doesn't express frustration with the assessments. | |
Progress monitoring is a research-based strategy that measures student achievement through the use of targeted instruction and frequent (e.g., weekly, monthly) assessment of academic performance. Based on the information collected, teachers can chart a student’s progress toward his or her individual goals and make adjustments when necessary—including adjustments to instructional approaches and to the number and types of accommodations used (Quenemoen, Thurlow, Moen, Thompson, & Blount Morse, 2004). Not insignificantly, such regular student assessment also allows teachers to pinpoint when a student is having difficulty (National Center on Student Progress Monitoring, n.d.).
Assessment strategies in progress monitoring can take many forms, as the box at the bottom of the page shows, including: curriculum-based measurement (CBM), classroom assessments (system- or teacher-developed), adaptive assessments, and large-scale assessments (including state and districtwide assessments).
Progress monitoring is especially useful with students who have difficulty showing what they know in typical assessments. When the accommodations specified in each student's IEP are consistently provided, progress monitoring allows a real view of what skills and knowledge a student has (National Center on Student Progress Monitoring, n.d.). IEP teams and educators can then use the information from these assessments to ensure that students are taught in a way that meets their needs and helps them address their academic goals.
Continual progress monitoring also helps to determine whether or not a selected accommodation is having the desired effect. “Too often we assign accommodations, but we don’t evaluate whether they help the student or not,” states Melissa Fincher, Assistant Director of Georgia’s Department of Education’s Testing Division. Susan Kennedy, Education Manager of Connecticut’s NCLB Office, agrees, adding that teachers “should be keeping track of what's helpful, what's not helpful, and have that be the basis of their determination about whether they're going to use it on the test.” Lynn Holland, of Georgia’s Department of Education’s Division for Exceptional Students, adds, “We do try to talk with teachers, through their directors usually, in thinking through and keeping data on what accommodations are actually producing results.”
The National Center on Student Progress Monitoring offers a wide variety of resources to help educators build progress monitoring systems in their classrooms and schools. The Review of Progress Monitoring Tools (http://www.studentprogress.org/chart/chart.asp), for example, helps teachers make decisions about which assessments to use. Assessments are evaluated along a number of important dimensions, including:
- Reliability and validity
- Alternate forms
- Sensitivity to student improvement
- AYP benchmarks
- Improving student learning or teaching
- Rates of improvement
Fundamentally, progress monitoring works when teachers use it regularly to reflect on how well instruction is supporting each student's needs. “Progress monitoring in a standards-based system can be the key to unlocking powerful skills and knowledge for teachers and students and can result in success for the school, district, and state in an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system” (Quenemon et al., 2004, p. 16).