Which test to give

How do I know what progress monitoring test to give?

We don’t have one test you can give a student to determine what grade to start progress monitoring, but where to start depends to a great extent on what information you already have on a student.

For instance, if you have a 4th grade student, and you know they are functioning below that grade level, start testing them at the third grade level and go up or down in grades until you find the level of test where a student scores at the 50th percentile. You may have to play around with various tests but eventually you will be able to determine where a student's skill and grade level aptitudes are.

For reading, there are added considerations in deciding which test to administer. Reading measures have skill sets that 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, Basic and Proficient Reading. A student might possibly do better in higher grades of basic reading skills but need to drop down to lower grades on the more difficult skill sets. You are not only trying to determine where their knowledge lies but also their ability to read and understand words and sentences.

In literacy, if the upper skills sets of proficient and basic reading, vocabulary, and passage reading fluency are proving to be too difficult for a student, drop down not only the grade but also the skill set difficulty to word reading fluency and if reading words is too difficult, then go to the building blocks of phoneme segmenting, letter names and letter sounds.

The goal is twofold, to determine what underlying skill deficit might be leading to the student’s “not proficient” score and to identify the appropriate measure to use to monitor the student’s improving skill as they receives targeted intervention/instruction aimed at addressing those skill deficits.

In all cases, the teacher needs to assist the student in moving up to the most challenging grade-level tests they can, as quickly as they can, but each student’s trajectory is likely to be slightly different (it will depend on their level of initial skill/underlying skill deficits; the intensity of intervention provided to him/her; his/her ability to benefit from that particular intervention [as well as motivation to improve]; attendance [a student must be present to benefit from instruction, etc.).