Measuring Progress and Ongoing Assessment: What We Need to Know Before We Know What Works
Reprinted with permission of
Utah Special Educator, May 2009, Vol. 31 no. 4
by Mark P. Groskreutz, Utah State University
The first thing we know about students in special education is that the general curriculum is not sufficient for successful learning. Students receiving special education services may learn to succeed in general education with initial or ongoing assistance, but the key is that without additional support, these students do not reach their full potential. Therefore, we, as special educators, must continually evaluate our students' progress and make adjustments to programs and teaching strategies when adequate progress is not being made.
The second thing we know about students in regular or special education is that if they have not been making progress over the past weeks and months, they are not likely to start making progress unless we change something. Learning is not a magical process: It is an orderly process that occurs when students have sufficient motivation, appropriate prerequisite skills, and exposure to effective educational strategies. For example, if a student has a program to learn turn-taking during play but does not like the game, he won't participate or learn to take turns. In this case, we
need to find ways to motivate the student, likely a different toy or reinforcement system will be needed initially. In an alternate example, if a student has a program to learn to take turns but does not wait appropriately, she will also not learn to take turns appropriately. In this example, waiting is a potential prerequisite skill to taking turns, and she does not yet have this skill in her repertoire. Therefore, she will not learn to take turns appropriately until she learns to wait during play activities.
So, given what we know about students and learning, how do we find out what works? Surprisingly, it's not that difficult...in theory. We know the current plan is working when the student is making progress! This means we must measure progress, and in special education, this means measuring frequently, i.e., measure every day, whenever possible. We cannot simply assume that our students will make progress. Only when we frequently measure student success can we see that the current plan is, in fact, resulting in the student doing better each day, week, or month. If the
student is making progress, we know what works! You and the student are doing fantastic, keep it up!
Students are placed in special education, because they have different educational needs than their peers. If through frequent measurement, we determine that the student is not making progress over a reasonable time frame for that specific student, then we must change how or what we are teaching the student. We must make at least some changes, because what we know in this case is that the current program is not working. While it
can be discouraging when we find out a student is not making progress, don't despair. We have taken the first step to finding what works when we determine a student is not making progress. The next step is to identify why our student is not making progress. Is it for motivational reasons? Do we need to teach a prerequisite skill? Should we add or modify teaching procedures (e.g., prompting procedures)? When we begin to ask and answer
these questions, we will find what works for our student. This is the best thing we can do, keep it up!
Taking a step back, to identify if something is working or not, we must frequently measure student performance. There are several ways to measure performance, for example, counting the number of appropriate requests in an hour or recording the total time on-task during the first 10 minutes of class. The more often we measure performance, the sooner we are likely to notice that a student is being successful or unsuccessful. Moreover, we must take lack of progress as a signal that the current program is not
working. This signal means we need to look closely at student performance and not simply assume the student will make progress again. If we do not frequently measure performance, we cannot determine if a student is making progress. In this case, we cannot know what works.
Frequent measurement facilitates ongoing assessment, because we can ask questions about when a student is successful and when she is unsuccessful. For example, if the student is often successful with a certain program but occasionally unsuccessful, she may not be sufficiently motivated. We then need to identify ways to increase motivation for the student. In a different example, a student may rarely be successful with a program, which
could again indicate a lack of motivation; alternatively he may require more explicit teaching of the prerequisite skills (e.g., using prompts and prompt fading). With these types of information, we can then begin to change programs in ways that may help our students make progress.
In special education, we are challenged to effectively individualize curriculum for our students: No single curriculum works for every student. To help our students succeed, we need to be sensitive to their progress or lack of progress. The only way to do this is measure their performance frequently. As we continue to measure their performance, we can then be confident that what we are doing works for that student or determine that
we need to make changes. Fortunately, by measuring performance often, we can analyze the effects of the current program on student progress and ultimately find what works.
