Shock--no research for weekly probes?

[Reading@EDGE]

Dick,

I am really experiencing some utter shock as I read your post that
there is no research supporting weekly testing. I am a reading
teacher collaborating with teachers to provide high quality,
differentiated tier 1 instruction as well as some interventions. Our
district has adopted a weekly progress monitoring system that,
unfortunately, eats into instructional time. Additionally, the weekly
probes that are given to students involved in interventions are not
always sensitive enough to show progress made by students in 1 week.
I assumed that my district adopted this approach through sound
research. After all, isn't incorporating research-based practices a
key pillar of RTI?

Dick and others, please share other methods for monitoring student
progress. I will anxiously await your insights!

[Dick]

Unfortunately, as I noted in my blog, there is no research supporting
weekly testing, or even monthly testing as progress monitoring
techniques. The research that has been done and published so far on
RTI has relied on progress monitoring two or three times per year,
none more frequently. I think this is simply because there are no
reliable weekly progress monitoring assessments available. Now if you
were monitoring prerequisite knowledges such as letter name knowledge
or consonant sounds, monitoring those more frequently may be useful
since they typically take only a few weeks to teach. But when it comes
to reading improvement the best assessment strategy is running records
in K-1 and maybe in 2 but what we are really looking for is silent
reading comprehension growth not oral reading accuracy or rate.

Dick Allington