What are the distinguishing characteristics of progress monitoring and CBM? How do they differ from other types of formative assessments?
What are the distinguishing characteristics of progress monitoring and CBM? How do they differ from other types of formative assessments?
In this video, Dr. Russell Gersten, Senior Advisor to the National Center on Intensive Intervention and Professor Emeritus at the College of Education at the University of Oregon, discusses the similarities of progress monitoring and CBM and how they are different from other types of formative assessments.
Question: What are the distinguishing characteristics of progress monitoring and CBM? How do they differ from other types of formative assessments?
Answer: Progress monitoring though I think is really, really important, and especially for the kind of students we’re talking about. This is the key difference between progress monitoring and the usual technique that we’ve been using on and off for 50, 60, 70 years of a weekly unit test. With progress monitoring, the measures, we know they’re valid and reliable, so we know that they predict how kids are gonna do later in the year in achievement in reading or math. So one key thing is, tests that come with publishers, we don’t know if they’re reliable, we have no idea if they’re valid or predict anything. Another key difference is that progress monitoring; you want a measure that is like height and weight, it doesn’t change, it doesn’t get harder or easier from time to time, that they’re parallel forms. And with any unit test, and I’ve developed them I’m sure all of us have developed them, some weeks the material is easier or the items are easier, there are some giveaway items or whatever, so the difficulty varies all over the place, so if a child’s scores go up you don’t know if the kid is doing better, or if there’s simply an array of easier passages to read or word lists to read or comprehension questions to answer. So those are probably the key distinctions that you want to measure that is closer to height or weight that it doesn’t change and it is reliable and that way you can tell if a student is improving if there is a positive slope or growth.