Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) represents a critical strategy for data-based decisionmaking within educational settings. Visual analysis is frequently used to analyze CBM data; thus, CBM vendors often automatically generate graphs based on student data to facilitate analysis. Differences in graph formatting are apparent across CBM vendors, and…

Early identification of students needing additional support is a foundational component of Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS). Due to the resource-intensive nature of implementing MTSS, it is critical that universal screening procedures are maximally accurate and efficient. The purpose of this study was to compare the classification accuracy…

A growing body of research suggests that growth in early literacy skills, including letter sound fluency, is predictive of later reading outcomes. In turn, educators and school psychologists use measures of letter sound fluency to monitor student response to early reading instruction. Limited research has evaluated whether decision-making…

This study examined the effect of progress monitoring frequency and scoring metric on curriculum-based measurement of written expression (CBM-WE) progress monitoring estimates. The writing progress of 116 second-grade students receiving a classwide writing fluency intervention in their general education classrooms was monitored across 13 weeks…

The current study evaluated whether goal-setting practices that account for seasonal developmental patterns of reading growth decreased the number of weeks data needed to be collected in order to yield accurate response to intervention decisions for a sample of 224 third-grade students. The extent to which more complex decision-making practices…

Despite repeated findings that within-year growth in oral reading rate is nonlinear for many students, existing decision-making frameworks to evaluate response to intervention assume that growth is linear across an entire school year. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the consequences of failing to account for nonlinear growth among…

Once students meet exit criteria and Tier 2 reading supports are removed, many do not maintain their current progress and fail to meet future performance benchmarks. Although estimates of average growth during intervention exist, typical rates of growth after supports are removed are relatively unknown. In this research brief, we used segmented…

School-based professionals often use curriculum-based measurement of reading (CBM-R) to monitor the progress of students with reading difficulties. Much of the extant CBM-R progress monitoring research has focused on its use for making group-level decisions, and less is known about using CBM-R to make decisions at the individual level. To inform…

This study evaluated the impact of a low-intensity strategy designed to facilitate maintenance of reading skill gains made during Tier 2 intervention. A subsample of kindergarten, second grade, and third grade students who exited from a standard protocol Tier 2 intervention (n = 168) continued to receive brief (2-3 min), weekly opportunities to…

Educators and researchers measure student improvement in words read correct per minute (WRCM) to evaluate student response to reading interventions. The utility of evaluating improvement in WRCM via curriculum-based measures to make instructional decisions is based upon the assumption that growth in WRCM is predictive of performance on meaningful…

Recent simulations suggest that trend line decision rules applied to curriculum-based measurement of reading progress monitoring data may lead to inaccurate interpretations unless data are collected for upward of 3 months. The authors of those studies did not manipulate goal line slope or account for a student's level of initial performance when…

Single-case designs provide an established technology for evaluating the effects of academic interventions. Researchers interested in studying the long-term effects of reading interventions often use curriculum-based measures of reading (CBM-R) as they possess many of the desirable characteristics for use in a time-series design. The reliability…

One consideration for selecting progress monitoring tools is the reliability in which the instrument measures student response to instruction. Researchers and vendors establish reliability of growth using two analytic methods: (a) calculating slopes to even and odd observations for each student and correlating the resulting slopes (split-half),…

School psychologists regularly use decision rules to interpret student response to intervention in reading. Recent research suggests that the accuracy of those decision rules depends on the duration of progress monitoring, the number of observations available, and the amount of measurement error present. In this study, we extended existing…

Student response to instruction is a key piece of information that school psychologists use to make instructional decisions. Curriculum-based measures (CBMs) are the most commonly used and researched family of academic progress-monitoring assessments. There are a variety of reading CBMs that differ in the type and specificity of skills they…