Progress Monitoring in an Inclusive Standards-based Assessment and Accountability System

NCEO Synthesis Report 53

Published by the National Center on Educational Outcomes

Prepared by:
Rachel Quenemoen
Martha Thurlow
Ross Moen
Sandra Thompson
Amanda Blount Morse

February 2004

Any or all portions of this document may be reproduced and distributed without prior permission, provided the source is cited as:

Quenemoen, R., Thurlow, M., Moen, R., Thompson, S. & Morse, A. B. (2003). Progress monitoring in an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system (Synthesis Report 53). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes. Retrieved [today's date], from the World Wide Web: http://education.umn.edu/NCEO/OnlinePubs/Synthesis53.html

Executive Summary

While progress monitoring holds much promise for improved outcomes and higher expectations, there are contextual challenges that must be addressed. The challenges that are tied to the progress of students with disabilities that affect the implementation of effective progress monitoring include historical limited access to challenging curriculum, instruction, and assessment; concerns about the target of measurement, that is, whether only basic skills or a full range of rich and challenging content should be measured; and limited use of data for effective provision of instructional strategies, interventions, and supports.

We discuss the benefits and uses of progress monitoring methods and formative data sources in four general categories: (1) Curriculum-Based Measurement; (2) Classroom assessments (system or teacher-developed); (3) Adaptive assessments; and (4) Large-scale assessments used during the year to monitor growth of individual students and groups of students. We conclude the paper with several recommendations for practice:

Use multiple measures for progress monitoring.
Commit necessary resources to build skills and knowledge of all staff on how progress monitoring is used for improvement.
Find and use available resources.
Specifically articulate and address as a community the contextual issues of standards-based systems.
Apply universal design for learning principles to the design of progress monitoring techniques to ensure that individual learner differences are considered from the start.
Be prepared to have an open discussion of whether the benefit of a comprehensive progress monitoring improvement process is sufficiently large to offset the additional time or cost required for implementation, and enlist the partnership of practitioners who have had success.

Acknowledgements

Our colleagues from three national centers provided comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We thank them for their insights, and encourage readers to make use of their resources. The first is an established center on accessing the general curriculum; the last two are very new progress monitoring centers, funded in 2003.

National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum (NCAC)
CAST, Inc.
40 Harvard Mills Square, Suite 3
Wakefield MA 01880-3233
phone: 781.245.2212 x233 | fax 781.245.5212
TTY: 781.245.9320
e-mail: ncac@cast.org
http://www.cast.org/ncac

National Center on Student Progress Monitoring: Improving Proven Practices in the Elementary Grades
American Institutes for Research
1000 Thomas Jefferson Street, NW
Washington, DC 20007
phone: 202.944.5300 | fax: 202.944.5454
TTY: 877.334.3499
e-mail: studentprogress@air.org
http://www.studentprogress.org/

Research Institute on Progress Monitoring
Institute on Community Integration and Department of Educational Psychology
College of Education and Human Development
University of Minnesota
111 A Pattee Hall
150 Pillsbury Dr SE
Minneapolis MN 55455
Phone: 612.626.7220 | fax: 612.625.6619
e-mail: walla001@umn.edu

Overview

This report describes how progress monitoring—a set of techniques for assessing student performance on a regular and frequent basis—can be an essential and integral part of an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system. The nation’s current emphasis on a standards-based educational system defines success in terms of all children achieving grade-level proficiency. This is a very different context from that in which progress monitoring has been used in the past, where progress was measured against individual starting points, and not to an external criterion. For students with disabilities, the child was expected to make "reasonable" progress defined by the Individualized Educational Program (IEP), which reflected how much progress the school, parent, and student were willing to accept. The emphasis on external criteria of grade-level content and achievement standards in an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system has raised the bar of what "reasonable" student progress is. Schools are held accountable for these higher expectations regardless of past practices.

In order to meet the higher expectations of current standards-based systems, educators need information that can be used to project how students are doing against the grade-level standards throughout the course of the year so they can determine what needs to be done to accelerate student progress toward the proficiency standards. Progress monitoring techniques can provide that information. Although the promise of progress monitoring is great, the techniques are not universally used, nor are they universally understood in the context of standards-based reform. If progress monitoring is going to be relevant to the current context of standards-based assessment and accountability, external criteria must be a part of the progress monitoring system.

We first describe the current context of standards-based assessment and accountability systems in which students with disabilities are to be included. Next we identify and discuss the contextual challenges that must be addressed for the promise of progress monitoring to be reached within an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system. We describe a comprehensive progress monitoring improvement process with multiple assessment methods that fit into a standards-based system. Finally, we offer recommendations to consider as progress monitoring approaches are added to inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability systems.

Context of Inclusive Standards-based Assessment and Accountability Systems

With the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1997, significant new requirements were put into place to ensure that all students had access to and made progress in the general curriculum to the maximum extent possible. One way to support this access to and progress in the curriculum was to require that students with disabilities participate in state and district assessments, with appropriate accommodations if necessary, or in alternate assessments developed for those students unable to participate in general state and district assessments. Assessment of student achievement and the accompanying requirement of state, district, and school accountability for all students’ success in the grade-level content is the centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB).

A decade ago, most states included fewer than 10% of students with disabilities in achievement testing or they simply did not know how many participated (Shriner & Thurlow, 1993). That number often reflected states’ expectations about who could achieve and beliefs that achievement requirements could harm some students. At the turn of the century, the average percentage of students in the general assessment was 84% (Thurlow, Wiley, & Bielinski, 2002), and since then, NCLB has required a 95% participation rate in the assessment system. The education system has had to come a long way quickly, based on a belief that the greatest harm to students is caused by what President Bush has called the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

Research suggested that even when students with disabilities participated in assessment systems, the assessment results were not necessarily used in the same way for students with disabilities as the results of other students were used (Krentz, Thurlow, & Callender, 2000). Sometimes they were not reported and sometimes they were not included in accountability systems. Adding to this is considerable evidence that statewide test results for students with disabilities are poor (Thurlow et al., 2002), generally falling significantly below the performance of students without disabilities.

Thus the challenge for states and districts is discovering how to move beyond simply ensuring that students with disabilities participate in assessments and that their results are reported. They need to find ways to improve those results. While many good recommendations can be made that focus on the assessments themselves, such as developing universally designed assessments (Thompson, Johnstone, & Thurlow, 2002) and providing students with appropriate accommodations (Thurlow, Quenemoen, Thompson, & Lehr, 2001), more than this is needed to improve educational results.

Fuchs and Fuchs (1986) are among many (Fuchs & Deno, 1991; Helwig, Heath, & Tindal, 2000; Langenfeld, Thurlow, & Scott, 1997; Lindsey, 1990; Marston, 1989; Paulson, Paulson, & Meyer, 1991; Stecker & Fuchs, 2000; Stiggins, 2001; Wiggins & McTigue, 1998) who have emphasized that it is essential to have assessment that involves the ongoing collection and use of information to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction. The President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education (U.S. Department of Education, 2002) also emphasized the need for implementation of continuous progress monitoring. There seems to be growing recognition among educators, researchers, and policymakers of the need for more widespread use of progress monitoring, that is, a set of techniques for assessing student performance on a regular and frequent basis.