Curriculum Based Measurement (or sometimes Assessment)

I was lucky enough to attend a workshop on Curriculum Based Management yesterday with the brilliant Jim Wright. Jim is the guru who created Intervention Central. Intervention Central is an awesome website which contains tons of materials, probes, graphing downloads, instructions for training peer tutors, for the teacher of reading, math, or writing to learn and track struggling students' progress to the tiniest degree, thus monitoring the student to be sure that whatever interventions are in place, are being effective.

For fun, let's say I teach reading. (I know, I actually do, but bear with me.) I have a student who is in 6th grade, but can only read fluently at a much lower level. CBM is designed that I would

1. Be able to figure out the student's independent, instructional, and frustrational reading levels
2. Find ideas as to how to intervene and increase that student's fluency
3. Create reading probes so that I can have the student do timed reading once a week using appropriate instructional level materials.
4. Download and insert the information from the reading probe into a graph to check to progress or lack there of.

I like the idea of CBM, because how many times do students slip through the cracks because they receive intervention, but at the end of the school year did not progress? One of the ideas behind CBM is that by tracking this information we can see trends of progress or regression and know if the current invtervention strategy is working or needs to be changed.

Beautiful website! Kudos to you, Jim Wright!