Academic+Skills

=Measuring Student Response To Intervention=

In the Response to Intervention Model, progress monitoring occurs with students who receive Tier II and Tier III interventions weekly or bimonthly. National experts on RTI recommend Curriculum Based Measurement, or CBM, as a valid, reliable tool for progress monitoring and determining whether students are responding to interventions.

There are two main types of Curriculum Based Measurement. The first involves measuring mastery on certain subskills. End of unit assessments are one example of this type of progress monitoring tool. In mastery measurement, teachers assess whether students have learned specific content (for example, adding fractions) and then move on to the next skill once the content is mastered. These are good assessments for answering core Tier I/PLC questions: What do I want the student to learn? How will I know when he or she has learned it? Mastery measurement, however, makes it difficult to compare test scores from different times during the year to measure a student's overall rate of progress (Response to Intervention) over time.

General Outcome Measures are used to sample a student's progress across several goals, and are a more valid and reliable way to measure whether students are responding to targeted and intensive interventions. These measures are standardized and are associated with researched rates of progress; Therefore, they are helpful in quantifying whether a student's progress is sufficient to close the achievement gap. CBM is often referred to with the acronym //**DIBS**//, or //**Dynamic Indicators of Basic Skills**//. CBM measures are //**Dynamic**// as they are quick and easy to administer and sensitive to change in the short term. They are designed to be overall **//Indicators//** of **//B////asic Skills//**. Much as a thermometer can detect a fever and determine whether the fever is reduced by treatment, CBM can measure whether there is a delay in the development of a student's Basic Skills, and can montitor whether interventions are working. Researchers at University of Oregon who developed DIBELS incorporated this acronym to name their measurement (The EL in DIBELS stands for Early Literacy). DIBELS are one example of Curriculum Based Measurement, and one resource for free CBM probes. CBM is **research based**. Validity studies show good correlation with other standardized tests, demonstrate the utility of CBM within the problem solving model, and show that when teachers use CBM and graph results, student achievement improves.

Here are two great resources for those interested in learning more about using CBM to measure RTI: [|www.rti4success.org] [|www.studentprogress.org]

Here are two great resources for downloading free CBM probes: [|www.easycbm.com] [|www.dibels.org]

Here is a to help you incorporate data into your RTI intervention plan.