Measuring Student Progress

One of the most important things we have to consider when we are supporting struggling students is:

How we will measure student progress?

This is absolutely CRITICAL in making sure that the plan we have designed to help them get back on track is actually working. This is proof that we are on track.

As parents of struggling students, we need to be requesting this information.

As educators responsible for delivering on student plans and goals we need to be sure we are tracking this information.

So the question becomes, what on earth are we looking for and how do we appropriately measure student progress?

Clearly, the way we measure student progress truly depends on the goals being set for each student but the number one thing we need to be clear on is:

What is the primary skill that needs to be supported in order to reach our end goal?

So for example, if a student is struggling with reading comprehension we will want to measure student progress in the area of comprehension but ALSO we need to be looking at the skills that are impacting reading comprehension. A student may struggle with reading comprehension because his or her decoding skills are poor (he or she can’t accurately sound out words) and so they are missing a great deal of content just because of the decoding issue. Or a student may struggle with vocabulary and so while he or she is reading accurately from the text they aren’t getting meaning from the passage because there are too many vocabulary gaps and holes. Or a student may struggle with reading comprehension because he or she doesn’t have strong listening comprehension skills and struggles to pull out key details such as who, what, when, where, why, and how when they are hearing information.

Through the assessment of a student…

We should know what the primary area of need is

and also…

the primary contributing factor that is creating the primary area of need.

When measuring student progress we must measure both the progress toward a student’s end goal and also their progress in each of the contributing factors.

When we are measuring student progress we need to:

Make sure that we have concrete measurable goals

This means that the goal needs to be binary - yes they reached the goal or no they did not reach the goal. We absolutely cannot measure goals using purely subjective benchmarks relying on “observation.” We need to figure out how to create rubrics to quantify student progress.

As much as we’d like to rely on our own observations, our observations as educators can at times be skewed based on a number of factors including but not limited to: student behavior, our mood, how hard we feel a student is working, it really goes on and on…it’s not our fault, but it is something that we need to be aware of. So we need to have goals that can be quantified using rubrics.

To grab our free data tracking spreadsheet, >>click here!<<

How often should progress be measured?

It really depends on the setting but informal progress should be measured daily through data tracking sheets. However, we realize this may or may not be feasible given the setting so we recommend that informal data tracking be completed weekly or at least every other week. Formal progress monitoring should occur every 4-6 months. We should be using our informal data tracking to make sure we are on track to hit our goals because the last thing we want is to realize 4-6 months down the road that our intervention wasn’t working.

This time is critical and we can’t be wasting it providing interventions that aren’t working.

This means we have to KNOW that our intervention is in fact working. We do this through formal or informal progress monitoring. Therefore we need to monitor progress as often as possible so that we can course-correct if necessary.

To make data tracking easier, be sure to grab our free Data Tracking System. This tool will help make data tracking easy and help you keep your session data organized.