Progress-Monitoring:  Which Instrument?

 

by Susan L. Hall, EdD

 

In my last blog I provided an overview of one of the more critical topics in RTI―progress monitoring.  Based on questions from teachers in the field, I prepared a list of the top five progress-monitoring questions. In this blog, I’ll tackle the question: Which assessment instrument should I use?

Another way to ask this question might be: Should I use the curriculum-based measure to monitor progress since that’s what we used for benchmark screening? The answer is “It depends.” The main factor the answer depends upon is the skill that is the focus of instruction in the intervention group. The purpose of progress monitoring is to measure whether the student’s reading is improving as a result of the instruction he’s receiving. It’s impossible to tell whether any improvements are related to the core reading instruction or to the intervention instruction, but does it matter? I suggest that it doesn’t. If what we’re doing is working, then we just have to keep doing it and make sure that the rate of progress is sufficient. We want our assessment to highlight any student who is not making progress from the combination of Tier I and Tier II or III. Poor progress means that it’s time to make a change in the instruction the student is receiving.

So the key is to match the assessment instrument as closely as possible with the skill of the intervention group. Some grade 2 and above teachers assume that they should always use the oral reading fluency part of the CBM as the progress monitoring tool, but that just isn’t the case. Let’s think about it using an analogy. Imagine that a novice golfer is losing strokes whenever his ball lands in a sand trap and he asks his instructor for some help with this. His instructor just spent an hour demonstrating the ideal technique for pitching balls out of a sand trap followed by giving the golfer an opportunity to practice using his sand wedge to pitch 100 balls out of a sand trap. Now it was time to see if he got it. So the instructor sent the golfer out to play a round of 18 holes on a course that had one sand trap and then sat down to look at his data. What’s wrong with this picture? There’s a mismatch between the instrument and the skill he’s attempting to measure. The assessment gave too few data points on the exact skill they had practiced.

The same is true for reading. Using an oral reading passage to assess the progress of a student in a long vowel silent-e group is an ineffective measurement tool because there may be only one or two words that contain this pattern out of the 100 words he read. It’s important to match the instrument to the skill. The table below shows how to do this.

 

Reading Component	Intervention Group Skill Focus	Appropriate Assessment Instrument
Comprehension	Comprehension	Comprehension
Fluency	Fluency with Connected Text	Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) (DIBELS or AIMSweb)
Phonics	Multisyllable Words	Phonics Screener – multisyllable word section
	Vowel Teams	Phonics Screener – vowel team section
	Long Vowel Silent-e	Phonics Screener – long vowel silent-e section
Phonological Awareness	Initial Sound at the Phoneme Level	Initial Sound Fluency (ISF) (DIBELS)
	Syllable Segmentation	Phonological Awareness Screener – syllable section
Letter Naming	Letter Names	Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) (DIBELS or AIMSweb)

 

Progress-Monitoring:  Common Questions

 

by Susan L. Hall, EdD

 

Today’s blog is on progress monitoring; we receive a lot of questions about this topic. Progress monitoring is important. It’s one of the defining characteristics of Response to Intervention (RTI). Without progress-monitoring data, RTI cannot be done. Progress monitoring is mentioned in two of the eight core principles of RTI from the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE):

 

• Principle #6: Monitor student progress to inform instruction.
• Principle #8: Use assessment for screening, diagnostics, and progress monitoring.

 NASDSE, Response to Intervention: Policy Considerations and Implementation. Alexandria, VA: Author.

 

In spite of how important progress monitoring is, many times we see practices in schools that just don’t make sense. One of my favorite misguided practices is when the instrument used to assess students in intervention doesn’t allow measuring the skill that is the focus of instruction. For example, let’s take the case of students who have been placed in an intervention group to address deficits in reading words that contain the long vowel silent-e pattern. How is progress monitoring with an oral reading passage going to tell you whether the instruction is working when only 3 of the 78 words read had the long vowel silent-e pattern? It doesn’t work.

 

Another misguided practice is when teachers are asked to progress monitor daily. As my 20-something kids would say, “Really?” Are you really using daily progress-monitoring data? Even assessing weekly is a lot. Unless you’re updating the student’s progress-monitoring graph weekly, administering the assessment that often may not be a good use of time. In fact, collecting data and not using it is a waste of time; it’s far better to spend that time teaching instead of assessing.

                                                 

Some of the most common questions we are asked about progress monitoring are:

• Which assessment instrument should I use?
• How often should I assess?
• Who should administer the progress-monitoring assessments?
• What do I do with all of this data?
• How do I measure whether progress is sufficient? How do I decide when to make changes?

The next several blogs will cover these questions in more detail. If you have questions that are not on this list, please send them to me.

Selecting the Appropriate Progress-Monitoring Tool

 

by Susan L. Hall, EdD

 

Today I was in Delaware teaching a workshop for educators. The host organization had arranged lunch with some of the administrators from the participating districts. I asked the administrators, “What is your greatest challenge in implementing RTI?” One RTI district director said that the greatest issue was the amount of time teachers were spending on progress monitoring. She followed up this statement with a question about whether only certified teachers should administer progress-monitoring assessments.

My response was that it’s not necessary for a certified teacher to administer all the periodic assessments, and that many staff members, including paraprofessionals, may do it. However, although many types of staff members can be trained to assess, the staff member teaching the group is the ideal person to administer the progress-monitoring assessment. The district director looked at her colleague and commented that they were not sure how they had gotten that impression or how that district policy had originated.

This discussion led me to ask how often they monitor progress. When they responded that they did so every six weeks, I knew there was a problem. In the world of RTI best practices, every six weeks is not considered all that often. How can it be taking so long? Next I asked which instrument they use for progress monitoring, and they said their CBM (e.g., DIBELS®, AIMSweb®). Apparently, no matter which group students are in, they are always monitored with a CBM.

Administering a CBM progress-monitoring oral reading fluency passage is an excellent tool for monitoring a fluency group, yet it is not ideal for assessing many other skill groups. Imagine a third grade group that is working on long vowel silent-e. There may be very few long vowel silent-e words contained in a passage so it’s impossible to determine whether the instruction is working. It’s far better to progress monitor such a group with a phonics screener every two to three weeks because it’s more sensitive to small changes in learning this specific skill. Then, every so often (maybe once or twice between benchmark periods), give an oral reading passage.

My model of good progress-monitoring practices depends on using a toolkit of assessments, including a combination of a CBM and diagnostic screeners. The CBM serves as the universal screener to identify the students who are at risk. Then, through analysis of the results, educators determine which diagnostic screener should be used for students below benchmark―phonological awareness or phonics.

Select the assessment that best measures the focus skill of the group; sometimes that’s the CBM, but other times it is not. The best diagnostic screeners have a main form (typically Form A) for diagnosis and initial group placement and at least two alternate forms for progress monitoring.

 

 

Copyright © 2010, 95 Percent Group Inc.

Revisiting the Definition of Phonemic Awareness   by Susan L. Hall, EdD Just when you think you’ve really got phonemic awareness mastered…along comes another level to understand. That’s why I love it! On Thursday morning October 27, 2010, I was listening to Marilyn Adams’ keynote address at the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) conference in Phoenix when she made three statements about phonemic awareness that I can’t get out of my mind. Please be advised that phonemic awareness was not the main topic of her address so she didn’t dwell on the statements that have me pondering. Dr. Adams’ keynote was titled “Learning to Read: What’s Hard Developmentally Was Also Hard Historically.” She began by talking about how people are wired for oral language but not for written language. Her theme was that a child’s journey to learn to read and write can be compared with the history of the development of written language, from cave paintings to pictograms to alphabetic writing. She showed examples of writing in past times where there were few vowels (similar to a child’s early attempts to write) and punctuation was completely nonexistent (also an issue in a child’s early writing). She referenced research that shows how well a student knows the letters at the beginning of Kindergarten is a fabulous predictor of reading, even two years later. Then it happened. Marilyn Adams made these three short statements before moving on: Phonemic awareness is not the ability to manipulate sounds. Phonemic awareness is the insight that every spoken word can be conceived as a sequence of phonemes. To identify it as a phoneme is to perceive it as the same vocal gesture repeated across different words (i.e., a familiar and recognizable entity). And I haven’t been able to get these three quick statements out of my mind since hearing them three weeks ago. During the past ten years, we’ve been defining phonemic awareness as the ability to manipulate sounds in words. OK, so now I’ve got to slow down and try to talk about the insight and not the manipulation. Could it be that when a student is able to manipulate sounds they are demonstrating that they have acquired this insight? We can’t measure insight in a child’s brain. But we can measure their ability to manipulate sounds. So maybe the definition of phonemic awareness needs to be refined to speak about the insight, yet we’ll measure a child’s ability to segment and manipulate sounds in words as a proxy for the insight. Thank you (once again) Marilyn Adams. You have contributed so profoundly to our field. Please let me know what you think by writing a response to this blog. Copyright © 2010, 95 Percent Group Inc.

Using Phonics Chips as an Instructional Tool   by Susan L. Hall, EdD To read and spell well, students need to make the connections between the sounds they hear in words and the letters used to spell those sounds. Reading requires rapid and automatic recognition and processing of patterns of letters in “chunks. While many programs teach letter-sound correspondence, orthographic pattern recognition should be a focus of teaching phonics. Pattern recognition is critical for reading fluency and for generalizing between words. The instructional focus should be on teaching patterns and not on individual words or specific letter-sound correspondences. I’m suggesting that students will increase the quantity of words they can read successfully, as well as the fluency of word recognition, if we call their attention to the salient characteristics of each phonics pattern. We want them to generalize from knowing one word to knowing other similar words. For example, in addition to highlighting that the vowel letter in the word cat is short a, we need to show students that this is because the vowel sound is spelled with one vowel letter and there is one or more consonants after the vowel. That’s the pattern―pattern recognition is critical. Fortunately, our brains are well suited for pattern finding. I’ve been thinking about how to make patterns more evident to students and am very excited to share some techniques to help students become pattern finders. One of the most powerful ways to demonstrate and highlight letter patterns is to use manipulatives. Teachers have readily adopted strategies including pulling objects into grid (Elkonin) boxes to demonstrate phoneme segmentation (often called move it and say it).         For several years, we've been studying the use of colored chips that we call phonics chips, which are small circular discs that can be used to call a student's attention to the phonics patterns. By using chips that are color coded in a very intentional way, it's possible to help students discover patterns of consonants and vowels. For instance, blue-red-blue represents a CVC pattern. This pattern signals instantly that the vowel should be pronounced with its short sound. (Students rarely have trouble with the consonant correspondences―it’s the vowels that are problematic.) Because the vowel is the important part of the closed syllable pattern, we trade the red vowel chip for one that has the vowel letter printed on it. We don’t trade the consonant chips in order to avoid distracting attention from the focus pattern. Phonics chips are a fun and engaging way to teach patterns to students and help them become pattern finders who fluently read words. I hope you will try it and share your experiences with other educators by writing a response to this blog.

 

Copyright © 2010, 95 Percent Group Inc.