Does monitoring progress help?

What was on Special Education Today five years ago?

Most readers are, I hope, familiar with the concept of monitoring students’ progress. The concept is a foundational idea in the development of individual education plans (Yell et al., 2020). In academic areas, curriculum based measures are probably the most common means of monitoring progress, but there are multiple methods of doing so (Sugita et al., 2021).

Although some people may object that monitoring progress is time consuming, too difficult to do, and is just more paperwork (objections that Brown, 2019, countered), there is plenty of evidence that progress monitoring practices are associated with better student outcomes (Fuchs & Fuchs Stecker et al., 2005). But just collecting progress-monitoring data is insufficient. As Stecker et al. summarized, teachers observed “significant [student] growth with CBM progress monitoring if they simultaneously implemented modifications in their instructional programs when warranted by student data; however, frequent progress monitoring alone (i.e., without instructional modifications) did not appear to boost student achievement” (p. 816).

Here is an illustration from Deborah Simmons and her colleagues (2013) showing how teachers’ use of progress monitoring data helped create better outcomes for students. It comes from Teach Effectively.