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Setting Progress Monitoring Goals

by Jana Bennett

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Within a developed Response to Intervention (RTI) framework, progress monitoring can help evaluate student academic growth and performance over time, capture real-time rates of improvement (ROI), and determine the effectiveness of instructional efforts, according to the National Center on Response to Intervention.1

However, without setting an achievement goal, student progress cannot be assessed accurately.

Why Progress Monitoring Goals Are Important

Educators have common questions and concerns. How are my students responding to the current instruction? How did this student respond to the Tier 2 intervention? Answering these and other questions becomes easier when a progress-monitoring goal is set and tracked toward.

Goals give educators direction and students motivation. When educators and students know, focus on, and work toward a clearly-defined end goal, educators can strategically monitor a student’s progress and use powerful data to alter instruction to improve student achievement. Students then can analyze and track their performance.

How to Set an Appropriate, Individual Progress Monitoring Goal

Step one to any data-driven progress monitoring method should be to set a goal – the score level on a given measure to be reached by a desired date.

On the aimswebTMPlus system, progress-monitoring goal-setting and -tracking is made easy. Using the goal slider that is based on accelerated student growth, educators can set goals per student, per measure. Goals can be set according to:

  • a raw score (a score that is associated with a high probability of passing end-of-year targets); 
  • a benchmark national percentile;   
  • a rate of improvement (ROI) or student growth percentile (SGP);   
  • and the ambitiousness of the goal based on national normative growth rates.

A set score can be established when a baseline score (usually the most
recent benchmark score), goal date, and frequency of testing is
selected.

How does your school set and track toward student progress monitoring goals?

Did you know all progress monitoring and benchmarking efforts can be done on one data-driven, web-based system? Learn how your district can seamlessly identify at-risk students early, set appropriate progress-monitoring goals, and improve student achievement.

Resources:

1 The National Center on Response to Intervention. “Progress Monitoring Briefs Series.” Retrieved August 20, 2016. http://www.rti4success.org/sites/default/files/RTI%20ProgressMonitoringBrief2-Missing%20Goal%20and%20Goal%20Line.pdf