Curriculum-Based Measurement

Curriculum-based measurement is a set of standardized, brief and frequently repeatable procedures for monitoring student progress in basic academic skills, developed by the special-education researcher Stanley Deno and colleagues at the University of Minnesota beginning in the late 1970s and set out in his influential 1985 article Curriculum-Based Measurement: The Emerging Alternative, published in Exceptional Children. Rather than measuring achievement once or twice a year with a lengthy standardized test, curriculum-based measurement uses short probes, often lasting only one to a few minutes, drawn directly from the material a student is being taught, most commonly oral reading fluency, along with mathematics computation, spelling and written expression, administered repeatedly, often weekly. Scores from successive probes are graphed over time against a goal line representing the rate of progress a student needs to reach a target, allowing a teacher to see quickly whether a student's actual rate of improvement is on track and to make a timely, data-based decision about whether an instructional approach is working or needs to be changed. Because it provides frequent, sensitive measures of growth rather than a single point-in-time score, curriculum-based measurement became a foundational progress-monitoring tool within response to intervention frameworks in special education, used to identify students who are not responding adequately to instruction and to evaluate whether a subsequent instructional change is helping.