A major responsibility of schools is to teach children the academic skills that
they will eventually need to take their place as responsible members of society. But schools not only teach crucial academic skills, they are also required to measure individual children's acquisition and mastery of these skills. The measurement of a child's school abilities is just as important as the teaching of those skills. After all, only by carefully testing what a child has learned can the instructor then draw conclusions about whether that student is ready to advance to more difficult material.
 

In the past, routine classroom testing has often involved the use of
commercially prepared tests. These tests have significant limitations, as we shall soon see. An alternative approach to academic assessment has recently become available, however, that allows teachers to closely monitor the rate of student educational progress. Educational researchers have devised a simple, statistically reliable, and practical means of measuring student skills in basic subject areas such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. In this approach, called curriculum-based measurement, or CBM, the student is given brief, timed exercises to complete, using materials drawn directly from the child's academic program. To date, teachers using CBM have found it to be both a powerful assessment tool for measuring mastery of basic skills and an efficient means of monitoring short-term and long-term student progress in key academic areas.
                                                                                                                         Jim Wright (www.interventioncentral.org)

Scott Leaman © 2001

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