PROGRESS MONITORING

Formal progress monitoring refers to a broad assessment or General Outcomes Measure (GOM), ideally the same broad construct as the universal screener, which will identify how the student’s general math ability is progressing in a normed comparison across other students at the same instructional level. Informal progress monitoring refers to mastery assessments within the intervention curriculum in the form of pre-/post-testing. Both are critical and vary in interpretation and application. We recommend administering a formal progress monitoring measure every two to four weeks, and skill-specific informal progress monitoring measures as often as needed in order to inform instruction and gauge students’ mastery.

According to Effective Universal Instruction: An Action-Oriented Approach to Improving Tier 1, "Once teachers determine which students are at risk and what they need, progress monitoring measures are used to help determine whether instruction and interventions are successful for an individual student," (Gibbons, Brown & Niebling, 2019). In other words, this monitoring data can offer insight to help teachers adjust their instruction when insufficient progress has been made. It also provides insight to help teachers objectively understand whether they need to continue or intensify instructional methods according to the data. According to the Center on Response to Intervention at the American Institutes of Research, the following criteria should be considered when determining progress monitoring measures:

• Measuring tools should have an adequate number of alternate forms of controlled and equal difficulty, allowing for progress monitoring of recommended interventions based on the student's level of intervention

• Tools should include guidance on the minimum acceptable growth and provide benchmarks minimum acceptable benchmarks

• Information should be provided on the reliability and validity of the performance-level score

• Depending upon the level of intervention required, students should be monitored routinely. Kansas MTSS & Alignment advises monitoring students on a General Outcome Measure once every three to four weeks.