Progress Monitoring

Abstract

As a form of classroom assessment, teachers use progress monitoring for two purposes. First, they determine whether a student's academic development over an academic year is proceeding well. Second, when a student is not progressing adequately, teachers use progress monitoring to design an individualized program that promotes better academic growth. In this article, we provide an overview of a mastery measurement approach to progress monitoring and explain its limitations. We then explain how mastery measurement and curriculum-based measurement, an alternative form of progress monitoring, differ. We focus the remainder of this article on curriculum-based measurement. We provide an overview for how teachers use curriculum-based measurement to make instructional decisions and then explain how curriculum-based measurement is an important component in the responsiveness to intervention education reform movement. We next describe the most common forms of curriculum-based measurement in mathematics and in reading, and conclude by discussing future directions.