Our children’s growth is constantly monitored at school through the constant stream of homework assignments, quizzes, tests, projects, and standardized exams. Our initial thought may be “they’re doing this already!” or “more tests?” when we first hear the term “student progress monitoring.”
Do you understand how much your child is learning or developing, though? During standardized testing, your child’s performance is compared to that of other students or state standards. Unfortunately, the tutor who has been working with your child throughout the year will be unable to utilize the test results to determine how to assist your child in learning better because these tests are administered at the end of the school year.
Progress monitoring can provide you and your child’s teacher with knowledge to help your child learn more and faster. Not just that, it will teach more skillfully and assist teachers in deciding what kind of education will be most beneficial for your child. In other words, student progress monitoring is not another method of giving your child a number; instead, it is a method of assisting both the student’s learning and the teacher’s instruction.
Progress monitoring tools for math: Crucial for providing progress information?
Monitoring student progress enables teachers to assess the success of their instruction, whether it be for a single student or the entire class. For instance, the kid might have a reading objective that specifies how many words per minute they should be able to read by the end of the year. Alternatively, the child’s math objective can be the number of questions successfully answered on exams covering the year’s worth of math material.
Following goal-setting and instruction, the teacher evaluates the student’s progress toward the goals each week. Since each exam is equally challenging, the weekly assessments can correctly reflect the child’s pace of progress.
The teacher can evaluate each test by comparing the material the student should have learned to the actual learning rate. If the student meets or exceeds the expectation, the teacher keeps teaching him or her in the same manner. However, if the kid falls short of the standard set, the teacher can modify the lesson plan and introduce newer ways to help the students.
The changes can vary anywhere from the method being utilized, the duration of instruction, the grouping configuration (for instance, individual instruction versus small-group instruction), or any such essential feature of teaching. In this procedure, the teacher seeks out the kind and volume of education that will allow the student to advance far enough in the direction of the objective.
The measurements last between one and five minutes, so the kids won’t feel like they are being evaluated all the time. Additionally, because the teacher monitors the student’s development regularly (typically once per week), the instructional plan can be changed as soon as the student needs it rather than waiting until a test or state evaluation reveals that the student’s requirements are not being fulfilled.
Free tools to measure your kid’s math performance
Math is an important subject, and waiting to measure for the annual tests to measure kids’ performance can carry a negative impact. Therefore, we have compiled a list of the best progress monitoring tools and assessment systems for math.
Progress Monitoring Tools
1. Easy CBM-Lite Version
The newer version of easyCBM Lite is content with all the refined features that one requires for monitoring their child’s learning progress. The Lite version now contains almost all the features available in the Deluxe plans. In addition, you can access one of the best technologies without adding any credit card details. All you need to do here is log in with the correct credentials, create a password, and access the features in a quick second.
Features included in the program:
- Cost: Cost can be a maker or the breaker of a deal. In this case, it definitely is a boon primarily because you get a tool that undoubtedly will help you monitor the progress without drilling a hole in your pocket.
- Maximum Students and Intended users: The plan is created for individual teachers who can then access almost 200 students with one login.
- Progress Monitoring Assessments: The easyCBM tool is created in such a manner that it provides the teachers a helping hand in order to manage the progress trajectory of the child. The tool’s algorithm is such that it will give the kid’s item level reports on where the kids are lacking with different assessments.
- Individual Progress Monitoring Graphs: Many times, the progress monitoring tools provide insight into collective data. However, with easyCBM, you can get a personalized per kid monitoring overview in the form of graphs showing the trajectory wherein, covering whether or not the child has flourished.
The program works exceptionally well for English, Spanish, and Math, allowing even the kids to access their progress reports and start working on their difficult areas.
2.Progress and Consistency Tool (PaCT)
PaCT is a tool that can be employed to measure progress in reading, writing, and math and was created to assist instructors in making trustworthy assessments of students’ achievements. As they make decisions in PaCT, teachers place students on the Learning Progression Frameworks (LPFs). PaCT helps teachers decide what is best for their student’s reading, writing, and math progress.
Benefits of using PaCT
- PaCT helps you reach consistent conclusions about your kids’ reading, writing, and math proficiency.
- PaCT provides you with accurate information that anyone may use.
- From the first day of school by year 10, PaCT enables the tracking of a student’s development both within and between schools.
- The data from PaCT reports can influence your selections concerning teaching programs.
- You can provide targeted feedback to students, parents, and whanau using PaCT.
PaCT encourages you to pay attention to the crucial components of kids’ reading, writing, and math skills, which helps evaluation for learning. The teachers can thus create a personalized overview of how the kid performs in the subjects.
Intervention And Assessments Programs
3. Middle School Skill Assessments
The middle school skill assessment tool checks the kid’s ability to solve the problems in the standard syllabus. This progress monitoring tool has classifications of assessments based on the grade the kid is in. At this moment, if you believe that your kid is lacking in class or you wish to test their knowledge, you can use these pre-assessments and click off the checklists. The best part about these pre-assessments is it includes a test guide wherein the kid themselves can test the answers and know where they fall back.
How to access the tool?
- Click the link above to access the tool.
- Start by selecting the checklists and check which concepts you know and which you don’t.
- Then move to the next assessment step and start answering the questions.
- Once done, you can cross-check your answers from the answer guide.
The kids here learn to monitor their own progress rather than someone else doing it for them. As a result, they will understand where they lack and which concepts are strong.
4. Primary Numeracy Assessment System
The Primary Numeracy Assessment System is a free math intervention curriculum tool that includes all the necessary assessments, leveled activities, intervention frameworks, lesson plans, workbooks, teacher guides, curriculum maps, and other countless resources. `
Features Of Primary Numeracy Assessment System
- Universal assessment: The test does much more than just count how many correct and incorrect answers and gives you a score. Additionally, it assesses the level of reasoning the student employs to resolve each issue.
- Progress monitoring and data tracking: The results of the Primary Numeracy Assessment are noted on the “Student Progress Monitoring” form after the test has been given. The students’ starting point statistics are the scores for each area. The data will support all choices about the curriculum.
- Teacher’s guide: With the help of the guided math lesson plan, teachers can design lessons for single students or small groups that are tailored to their requirements. Monitoring the development and progress of their students is made simple by the lesson plan. The Leveled Activities Guide is used to develop the lesson plan.
- Targeted Reassessment: The last step is to instruct, followed by any necessary re-access. Teachers can reassess any student at any time as they advance, allowing them to continue tracking their progress and introducing new lessons.
This tool is a one-stop solution for monitoring and challenging the kid’s progress. The prime reason for that being is that the tool allows you to test, monitor, and improvise all under one roof.
5. Multiplicative Thinking Intervention Program (3-5).
Another free math intervention program we provide is the Multiplicative Thinking Intervention Program (3-5). This program focuses on the developmental stages children go through when learning multiplication and division. A solid basis for multiplicative thinking is required because when rational numbers (fractions and decimals) are introduced, students must have a solid framework to draw connections and enhance their knowledge.
Benefits Of Multiplicative Thinking Intervention Program
- The progress monitoring/data tracking component provides a simple tool for tracking student progress.
- The data collected after the initial universal screening evaluation is recorded on the progress monitoring sheet.
- These scores serve as a baseline data point and provide important information about the learner, allowing data-driven decisions about which skills to focus on first.
- The program also includes daily formative assessments that can regularly make instructional decisions. The results of these daily assessments will determine which classes will be prepared and implemented.
The benefit of the program is that the teachers will be able to learn how to administer the Multiplicative Thinking Assessment and how to utilize the results and refine their instruction.
6. Delta Math
This website contains a wealth of fantastic resources. It includes not only screening materials but also Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention tools, all of which are available for free.
You can get ready-to-use teacher lesson plans, worksheets, and visual organizers for each intervention lesson from this Michigan-based website. There’s a lot to unpack here, so take your time reviewing all the resources to ensure you’ve tapped into all you might need.
How Does It Work?
- Tier 2 and Tier 3 screeners will identify student strengths and unfinished learning of high-priority standards from the previous grade level and two or more previous grade levels.
- Standards-based reports will show student performance data so that tier 2 intervention can begin with all kids, or small, flexible groups of students can be scheduled for each tier 2 or tier 3 standard.
- Tiered Instruction and Practice-The Institute for Education Sciences’ evidence-based suggestions for each readiness and tier 3 standard will be incorporated into intervention lessons. (Levels 2 and 3) After each intervention session, progress tracking will quantify and graph student progress toward each learning goal. Targeted practice, as well as distributed practice, will assist in intervention with large groups of students.
This progress monitoring has four screening recommendations, with one in each season. The tool works for both math and reading, and it can be your one-stop solution for checking on the kid’s performance.
Conclusion
Monitoring a kid’s performance, especially in math, helps both the teachers in getting an insight into the kid’s performance. It is intended for both the use of kids or teachers working directly to monitor the kids. Now, as you must have seen, all these tools ensure that you have a platform to rely on even if you wish to know how the child performed even after one day.
You can monitor the progress rate and the graphics trajectory and then make a constructive lesson plan. The prime goal for coaching/facilitation is to ensure that we keep a charge on what the kids are learning and then, based on the reports, must provide feedback to improve instruction. Thus, stop waiting for annual test reports; instead, monitor your child’s progress after every passing day and help your kid exceed.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,