Principal Investigator
Tracey Hall, Ph.D.
Funder
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (Grant number: H327B050009 )
Timeframe
2006– 2008
Project Description
Standards-based reform (SBR) has made a dramatic promise: to provide all students, regardless of ability, with a high-quality education. Yet students with disabilities are often not given adequate consideration in the standards themselves or in the instructional materials, methods, curriculum, and assessment tied to the standards. Teachers must be able to monitor their students’ progress against these standards but are increasingly challenged by the amount of time this takes and the reliability of the measurements. Technology, when properly utilized, can play a significant role in supporting standards-based reform by creating more flexible and timely methods for understanding and supporting student progress within the general curriculum.
CAST researchers are creating and evaluating a technology-based system that blends two powerful and proven approaches—Curriculum Based Measurement (CBM) and Universal Design for Learning—in digital learning environments to improve reading comprehension instruction for students with disabilities and, ultimately, to enhance the performance of students in standards-based settings. As a form of progress monitoring, CBM holds great promise in supporting teachers in assessing student performance and making informed instructional decisions. With technology, CBM can be universally designed and embedded into the instructional reading environment with additional supports to help teachers make data-driven decisions to meet the learning needs of individual students.
The project will determine whether the addition of CBM into a UDL computer-supported reading comprehension environment leads to better reading instruction for all students. This experimental study using growth modeling techniques seeks to determine if the promising practice of CBM more effectively fulfills its promise to support standards-based achievement for students with disabilities.
