Progress monitoring: an integral part of instruction

Kristi Santi Æ Sharon Vaughn

Published online: 22 May 2007

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Assessment for accountability purposes is a current theme in education. While many

would argue that accountability provides an opportunity for schools and districts to

take stock of how effectively students are learning and to disaggregate findings for

student groups to assure that learning is occurring for all students, there are others

who debate the practice of accountability with particular concerns about the use of a

‘‘one-time’’ measurement and the potential misuse and overemphasis on ‘‘test

preparation’’. Despite the likely ongoing discussions about accountability, ongoing

student monitoring through teacher administered progress monitoring measures

appears to be a practice that is less debated for its effectiveness.

In classrooms across the United States, teachers are increasingly asked to

administer progress monitoring assessments—particularly to low performing

students. Most would agree that this is time well spent—particularly if teachers

use the data to inform instructional decisions and thus student learning is improved.

Many of the assessments teachers give can be powerful instructional tools. To

realize their potential, teachers need to understand and effectively use these

assessments. However, too often teachers aren’t fully trained on how the

assessments inform instruction or how to interpret the results so they can use the

data to alter their instruction. Therefore, if teachers dedicate time to giving tests,

then school leaders are responsible for insuring that this time is not wasted—that

valuable information is not only gathered, but that it is understood by teachers and

used with their students. The use of ongoing progress monitoring is one type of

K. Santi (&)

The Santi Group, LLC, PO Box 20766, Houston, TX 77225, USA

e-mail: admin@thesantigroup.com

S. Vaughn

Department of Special Education, The College of Education, Vaughn Gross Center for

Reading and Language Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station

StopD, 4900, Austin, TX 78712, USA

e-mail: SRVaughnUM@aol.com

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Read Writ (2007) 20:535–537

DOI 10.1007/s11145-007-9053-2

assessment that teachers can quickly administer, easily interpret results, and change

instruction for individual, small groups, or whole groups of students to maintain

adequate growth of reading and reading related skills.

Given this goal of assisting teachers in their efforts to link the assessment back to

instruction, a starting point is the use of progress monitoring as part of the

instructional cycle. On-going progress monitoring provides teachers with a tool to

ensure that students are continually making progress toward the end of year

benchmark goals. This type of an assessment can be given as few as three times per

year for students who are not struggling and as often as once a week for students

with the most extreme learning difficulties. If teachers view the instructional cycle

as planning instruction, implementing effective instruction, and then monitoring

student progress on the core components of the instruction, assessment will move

from something to do for the district and/or state to something that is an integral part

of teaching.

Teachers who use on-going progress monitoring tools increase student perfor-

mance and are more likely to adjust instruction to better meet the need of each

student in their classroom. When teachers use data on a continuous basis and change

instruction based on the data, they are in effect providing intervention. This is one of

the reasons that ongoing progress monitoring is a valuable tool in the instructional

cycle. It is also a valuable tool as teachers can quickly and easily review the data and

alter instruction as needed without waiting for results to be returned from a secondary

company as with an outcome measure or without having the gap between assessment

time points as with a benchmark assessment. Therefore, progress monitoring, when

used frequently, can be a powerful tool to increase student performance.

The focus of this special issue is how to assist teachers in linking their progress

monitoring/curriculum- based measures to instructional practices that are associated

with improved outcomes for students with learning difficulties. Providing clear

linkages between progress monitoring and instruction for students with reading

difficulties is an essential feature of making assessments meaningful. Perhaps the

one agreed upon aspect of assessment is that it should inform instruction in

meaningful ways that improve outcomes for students. This is particularly true for

progress monitoring.

The articles included in this special issue center around the theme of using

ongoing progress monitoring data to information classroom and student instruction.

Several of the authors are noted for their work in this area. In this issue they expand

our understanding of progress monitoring by describing qualitative and quantitative

research on how to use data to inform instruction.

We start with a case study by Hines et al., which describes a single-subject

intervention with two first grade students using an onset rime intervention with

progress monitoring of skills taught at the beginning of each instructional session.

This case study reviewed the use of monitoring student performance at the

individual student level to directly and more immediately change instruction based

on student needs. The case study also looked at the students’ ability to transfer and

apply the skills taught to other reading opportunities. Thus this article contributes to

the progress monitoring literature by providing two case studies of data driven

intervention and how well the skills transferred to new reading opportunities.

536 K. Santi, S. Vaughn

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The next article, Fuchs and Fuchs, describes how ongoing progress monitoring

becomes part of the instructional routine. Through a randomized study with three

groups of teachers, the efficacy of using graphs and cut-points to monitor students’

response to instruction was studied. The teachers use of graphing student

performance and comparing the results to predetermined cut points assisted in the

identification of targeted instruction for students who were not meeting their

expected goals. Technology, benchmarks, and graphing are the empirical base by

which teachers’ use of the data is expanded.

The third article, by Denton et al., explains how coaches can assist teachers with

the process of incorporating assessment data in reading intervention programs for

improved student performance. The Student Focused Coaching model presented

highlights the importance of keeping student outcomes in the forefront of decision-

making including using teacher and student instructional interactions and a

systematic problem solving approach using collaborative consultation. This article

illustrates how coaching using progress monitoring could be implemented to benefit

students and teachers.

The fourth article, Al ‘Otaiba and Lake, explore how best to work with pre-

service teachers in the use of the progress monitoring to improve student reading

performance through a qualitative description of a pre-service program at a

university setting. This paper provides insight to the link between theory and

practice when training pre-service teachers in the area of using data to provide and

modify reading instruction.

The final article by Romain et al. reviews several reading programs for embedded

progress monitoring components. The review provides insight as to the difficulty

teachers face when trying to find progress monitoring materials within the reading

program they use for everyday reading instruction. This article provides practical

significance as teachers can use the chart provided to evaluate their reading

programs for progress monitoring tools and provides next steps for those who do not

have a progress monitoring component built into their materials.

These articles provide support for preparing prospective and current teachers on

the appropriate use of progress monitoring measures. Teachers who are confident

users of progress monitoring measures implement them regularly particularly with

students who have demonstrated reading difficulties/disabilities and use the

information from these measures to improve their instruction.

Progress monitoring 537

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