General - Rate of Improvement

New Resource for Educators – Education ABA Website

February 22, 2014 By Caitlin Leave a Comment

My good friend and colleague Kevin Kuhn has recently created a website for educators interested in resources and tools related to applied behavior analysis called Education ABA (also listed on the Resources page of this site). Given the scope my site, I’m a big fan of the page within this site about Graphing Data. Contrasted to the various downloads on my site, Kevin’s has many of his graphing templates available in an online form that can be shared through Google Drive. Below is a preview of the types of graphing templates available on Education ABA.

Frequency / Rate Graphing Template (with Goal Line & Trendline)
IEP Goal % Graphing
ABAB Design Semi-Logarithmic Graph
RTI and IEP Behavior Progress Monitoring – Rating / Likert Scale

Directions for using the graphs are built into the graphs themselves so educators can easily use and understand the templates. Graphs can be adapted and customized and are intended for use in response to intervention (RTI) frameworks and for monitoring goals in Individualized Education Plans (IEPs).

Filed Under: General

Emerging Best Practice for Determining ROI #1

February 5, 2014 By Caitlin 2 Comments

As part of my dissertation, I’ve compiled a list of what I think are emerging best practices for determining rate of improvement. In other words, what are the necessary conditions for having confidence in the ROI statistic? The first emerging best practice I’m considering is the use of technically adequate and psychometrically sound measures. If we don’t have good data, there’s no point in creating a trend line or calculating an ROI statistic. One of the best resources is the progress monitoring tools chart. Note that this chart can still be accessed through the National Center on Response to Intervention but is now housed at the National Center on Intensive Intervention. Not all assessments are located on this chart as they are submitted voluntarily but it’s good place to start if your school team is looking for ideas.

When school-based teams are considering making high stakes decisions such as special education eligibility, the quality of data needed is much higher. Teams need to consider if the assessments they are using is measuring what they intends to measure (validity) and if they can measure skills consistently (reliability). Other aspects of assessments to consider in relation to generating a stable trend line are whether the measure can demonstrate small increments of growth and if the assessments can be repeated through alternate forms. An example of a technically adequate measure that was designed to produce ROI is the computer adaptive tests from Renaissance Learning called STAR Reading and STAR Math. After only four data points, the system will generate a stable trend line that can be used to interpret student progress. A non-example would be teacher-made assessments or unit tests. The latter measures may be helpful for teachers to know how students are performing with concepts they are learning in class, but have not been validated for the purpose of generating trend lines or ROI from the results.

Questions and comments are welcome! What are your school teams using to document student progress?

Filed Under: General Tagged With: calculating ROI, computer adaptive tests, data, determining ROI, emerging best practices, progress monitoring, rate of improvement, Renaissance Learning, ROI, STAR Math, STAR Reading, student data, tracking progress

PA RtI Implementer’s Forum

June 24, 2013 By Caitlin Leave a Comment

Gearing up to present with Andy McCrea tomorrow as part of PaTTAN’s RtI Implementer’s Forum tomorrow. As Andy and I were updating the PowerPoint this past week, we realized we’ve been speaking on this topic for 5 years now! It’s been interesting to see the evolution of awareness in our participants over time. Many more participants have access to curriculum-based measurement (CBM) data than when we first started. Even more have figured out how to graph data and generate trend lines in Microsoft Excel, some without realizing they are essentially computing linear regression statistics! We’ve presented for a range of audiences that started out as mainly school psychologists but has expanded to teams who are implementing components of RtI in their schools. Tomorrow’s workshop is formatted for just that – teams! Should be another great interactive workshop!

RtI Implementer’s Forum Link

Filed Under: General, Workshops Tagged With: 5 years, data teams, Flinn, Forum, Implementer's Forum, linear regression, McCrea, PA, PaTTAN, Pennsylvania, rate of improvement, ROI, school psychologists, statistics, teams, workshops

Progress Monitoring… Life?

April 8, 2013 By Caitlin Leave a Comment

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything! Let me explain. A former Tough Mudder teammate and I were eyeing up the same marathon and decided to give training a go back in December! He signed up right away, but I decided to train first and sign up if I could get through the first couple of months. Well after a dozen or so weeks of tracking my running progress, I signed up! The marathon was last Saturday and it was definitely an amazing (and painful!) sense of accomplishment. I realized how much I benefitted from seeing my own progress and will continue to apply those same principals to the students (and teachers!) with whom I work. Have you ever used data “momentum” as encouragement at school or in your own life? Do tell!

Filed Under: General Tagged With: data, momentum, progress monitoring, running, tracking progress

Computer Adaptive Tests

September 24, 2012 By Caitlin 1 Comment

I’m in my second year at my current district where I serve the secondary student population (grades 7-12). My district’s elementary schools are doing a really nice job with their response to intervention (RtI) framework but we have a lot of work to do at my middle and high schools. At the end of last year, we purchased licenses to use STAR Math and STAR Reading (and STAR Early Literacy for the Elementary folks) through Renaissance Learning. I’ve recently been through a couple of trainings for how to administer and interpret the assessment and reports. I’m hopeful that these assessments will do a better job of capturing my older students’ skills, especially for the student’s in special education since they’ve been using the same CBM probes for years. Our STAR assessments can be used for universal screening, progress monitoring, and diagnostic purposes. Plus, they tie into the Common Core standards, which is so helpful for teachers who need to make the connection between assessment to high school classes!

Another feature I’m impressed with so far (surprise) is that the system provides you with a Student Growth Percentile. For instance, if a 7th grade student scores a grade equivalent of 4.5 on the Reading assessment, the report will tell me how much a student with that same profile (7th grade scoring 4.5) will typically “grow” by the end of the year. I’ve always wondered “how much growth can we expect?” from our students. I’ll have to see how this plays out for the school year. Because I need another project…

After attending some sobering workshops at my national school psych convention in February, I’m a little worried about the weight we place on student rate of improvement data when research suggests that we need at least 14 data points to have a reliable oral reading fluency trendline (Christ, Zoplouglu, Long, & Monaghen, 2012)!!! The STAR assessments can provide a reliable trendline after 4 data points. Think about how much sooner we could be making solid instructional decisions?! I’m curious if anyone else is using computer adaptive tests. It will certainly be a learning curve (ha…) for me this year!

Filed Under: General Tagged With: computer adaptive tests, rate of improvement, Renaissance Learning, STAR Math, STAR Reading, Student Growth Percentile

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February 22, 2011 By Caitlin Leave a Comment

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Rate of Improvement – How To