Monitoring Student Progress

Virtual Tutoring Fair

January 27, 2023

2 p.m. EST

There’s no one-size-fits-all tutoring program. Attend our virtual tutoring fair on January 27, 2023 at 2 p.m. EST to explore a variety of proven programs and interact with their providers.

Visit proventutoring.org to preview the tutoring programs that will be present at the fair.

3 Ways for Schools to Make Sure They Get What they Pay for in Learning Recovery

"The potential for missteps with available relief funds is exponential without evaluation."

Dr. Amanda Neitzel and Jen Krajewski

ProvenTutoring

Johns Hopkins University

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Progress Monitoring: Reaching Each Student

Understanding where a child is —their strengths and needs—is crucial to helping kids grow. Elementary teachers regularly assess student reading skills so they can group students appropriately. A basketball coach relies on certain drills to assess a player’s ball handling and shooting skills so they can help them improve their game. School counselors have appraisal methods to better understand the mental health of students. Individualized support is effective when we have a clear sense of what the student needs.

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges to learning recovery is tailoring efforts to the individual needs of students. Due to personal experiences with quarantines, remote learning, and access to critical learning resources, each student has been impacted by the pandemic differently, so they possess a unique constellation of gaps. Road-tested assessment and progress monitoring tools enable individualized student support in the following ways:

They help educators understand what students have mastered and the gaps in learning;
They help tutors understand whether there is progress and to what degree so instruction can be adjusted;
They help the provider and school understand how well the program is targeting student needs; and
They serve as a communication tool for families, the provider, the student, and the school so we can celebrate progress.

Progress monitoring tools play an integral role in all of the ProvenTutoring programs. Below are two examples of how our partners employ progress monitoring tools to adjust instruction and ensure student success.

Formative Assessment Produces Large Learning Gains

Through a school improvement initiative, Haskin Elementary School in Colorado implemented Lindamood-Bell’s instructional approach to address chronic levels of low literacy. The district’s transformation team used standardized diagnostic tools to pinpoint instructional needs (e.g., phonemic awareness or fluency or comprehension) and then to group students accordingly. Instructors trained and coached by Lindamood-Bell then utilized formative assessment data to adjust lesson plans based on the response and progress of each student. If necessary, students were regrouped to better match their skill development through the scope and sequence of the program. By differentiating instruction in specific skill sets, the school significantly outperformed comparison schools in the area of reading growth.

Formative assessment—a process that emphasizes assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning--is an integral part of the Lindamood-Bell intervention model. Highly skilled educators gather data on student learning during lessons, noting responses and areas of mastery or difficulty. Those data are then used to make instructional decisions in the moment. For Lindamood educators, formative assessment includes:

pinpointing student responses, especially errors, as opportunities to guide new learning and modify lesson planning;
using Socratic questioning to guide students in their learning; and
responding to the student’s response to allow them to analyze their answer and to discover the error themselves. This fosters their ability to self-monitor, leading to self-correction and independence in their learning behavior.

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Ongoing Progress Monitoring Enables Data-Driven Decisionmaking

AARP Foundation Experience Corps is an evidence-based intergenerational tutoring program that increases K-3 students’ reading fluency while improving reading comprehension, vocabulary development, and social-emotional skills. A central part of the program’s success is its data-driven processes to monitor student progress. Not only are pre- and post-assessments collected for evaluation using valid and reliable tools, but mid-year data is used to coach program staff and volunteer tutors on student progress, attendance, and formal assessment provided by the schools.

Additionally, weekly progress monitoring occurs through daily session logs entered into a proprietary tutoring software. Session logs permit program staff and tutors to monitor daily activities, chart growth over time, and make course corrections to support the individual needs of students. All 17 program locations use a valid assessment tool, with many using Dynamic Indicator of Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) to assess oral reading fluency with a focus on students’ accuracy, pace, and comprehension. Given the widening of the achievement gap due to COVID-19, data-driven decisions are now more than ever a crucial aspect of the program and continues to guides its success.

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More High-Dosage Programs

Explore other proven, high-dosage models in reading and mathematics on our website, proventutoring.org, or connect with us directly at [email protected].

ProvenTutoring | [email protected]