Progress Monitoring

Progress monitoring refers to repeated assessments using valid and reliable tools and processes to assess performance, quantify improvement or responsiveness to intervention and instruction, and evaluate the effectiveness of instruction, interventions, and supports. 

A scientifically based practice used to assess students’ performance over time and evaluate the effectiveness of instruction. Progress monitoring can be implemented with individual students or groups of students. Students that receive intervention should have their progress represented by a graph that reflects their baseline (start), their goal, their discrete performance over time, their trend (trendline) over time and the growth they are expected to make in order to meet their goal (goal line, aim line or target line). In addition, if the student is in an intervention group, individual performance should be compared in some way with the other students within that group.

Progress monitoring is the ongoing, frequent collection and use of formal data in order to (1) assess students’ performance, (2) quantify a student's rate of improvement or responsiveness to instruction or intervention, and (3) evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and intervention using valid and reliable measures. Educators use measures that are appropriate for the student’s grade and/or skill level. 

Effective progress monitoring requires different tools than those used for universal screening. While other assessments measure broad skills, progress monitoring measures must be highly sensitive to small amounts of growth and be able to reliably measure that growth quickly.