Curriculum-Based Measurement of Reading Progress Monitoring: The Importance of Growth Magnitude and Goal Setting in Decision Making Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Copyright 2017 by the National Association of School Psychologists. Research regarding the technical adequacy of growth estimates from curriculum-based measurement of reading progress monitoring data suggests that current decision-making frameworks are likely to yield inaccurate recommendations unless data are collected for extensive periods of time. Instances where data may not need to be collected for long periods to make defensible decisions are presented. Recommendations to collect data for upwards of 3 months may be appropriate for students whose rate of improvement (ROI) approximates the criterion to which their performance is being compared. A framework is presented to help evaluate whether a student's ROI is substantially discrepant from an expected rate of growth (i.e., goal line). A spreadsheet program was created that used user-specified parameters for goal line magnitude, dataset variability, and data collection duration, in order to identify critical ROIs to determine whether students were making adequate progress with different levels of certainty. Analyses suggest that decisions may be feasible sooner than previously thought, particularly when growth is highly discrepant from the goal line and variability in the data is limited. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

published proceedings

  • SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

author list (cited authors)

  • Van Norman, E. R., Christ, T. J., & Newell, K. W.

citation count

  • 12

complete list of authors

  • Van Norman, Ethan R||Christ, Theodore J||Newell, Kirsten W

editor list (cited editors)

  • Eckert, T.

publication date

  • September 2017