Which grade progress monitoring test do I give?

For students at risk and performing below their grade level, use progress monitoring (not benchmark tests). Although we don’t have one test to determine a student's grade-level performance, what grade test to administer depends to a great extent on what information you already have on a student.

In general, if you have a 4th grade student and you know they are functioning below the 4th grade level, try testing them with a third grade progress monitoring test. If they do not reach a 50th percentile score in 3rd grade, then drop the testing down to 2nd grade.

In the case of reading, you will not only consider the lowering of grades but also the ability to master reading skills. Reading skills stair step up in mastery with the easiest skills being:

• Letter Names
• Phoneme Segmenting
• Letter Sounds

then progressing up to the more difficult skills of:

• Word Reading Fluency
• Passage Reading Fluency

and the hardest skill of all:

• Proficient Reading

Students might possibly do better in higher grades of basic reading skills but need to drop down to lower grades (where more basic reading skills are offered) when working with reading comprehension. You are not only trying to determine where their knowledge lies but also their ability to read and understand words and sentences. The goal will always be to get students back on their expected grade level as soon as possible at the 50th percentile.

Although we don’t have a single test you can have a student take to determine the grade-level performance, there is a process you can use to help determine their skill and the most appropriate grade level assessments to use to monitor their progress.

For reading, the skill sets stair-step up in difficulty beginning with the fundamentals of reading: Letter Names, Phoneme Segmenting, Letter Sounds, and progressing up to the more difficult skills of Word Reading Fluency, Passage Reading Fluency, and the hardest of all, Proficient Reading.

For math, the skill sets do not stair-step up in difficulty, rather they align with set math focal point standards for each grade level. So one section of math skills will concentrate on a particular focal point, the second focal point, and the last one on the third focal point. One skill set here is not necessarily more difficult a concept than the other, just designed to test set focal point standards.

The easyCBM assessments are built on a scale of progressive difficulty, with each grade level becoming more challenging, and each measure type within a grade level also ‘stair-stepping’ up in difficulty.

In all cases, the teacher needs to assist the student in moving up to the most challenging grade-level tests as quickly as they can, but each student’s trajectory is likely to be slightly different.

For more information on progress monitoring and its measures, please click the link below and go to Page 9, Progress Monitoring Measures: easyCBM User's Manual