Curriculum Based Measurement

Description of student:
The student being assessed is an eleven –year- old female. This student is placed in a fifth-grade
resource room. Under IDEA, this student qualifies for services due to her Specific Learning
Disability. Student’s social skills are well developed. She does not struggle interacting with her
peers or adults. The student is considered to be 2 to 3 grade levels behind her typically
developing peers. Since she has a SLD, many strengths are shown. However, with those
strengths comes Dyslexia. Most of her struggles come from this. For example, in math she really
thrives off the lessons and calculations. However, since she has Dyslexia, this makes it more
difficult for her to read and process the information that is in front of her. Another major issue
for this student is that the class she is placed with is extremely distracting. The student is more
successful when she is working one on one and with peers who are quiet and will not distract
her.
Objective:
Given the metric unit vocabulary cards word bank and a verbal prompt of each word, TSW will
be able to correctly match the correct term to its definition with 80% accuracy, matching 10 out
12 successfully in 3 out of 4 trials.
Measurement Tool:

Element Trial 1 Trial 2 Trial 3 Trial 4 Totals:

Perimeter
Formula
Area
Composite Shape
Volume
Cubic Unit
Cube
Rectangular Prism
B
Dimension
Customary System
Metric System

Directions:
“I will be giving you the definition of the word. If you know the word, say it to me. The
definition is ‘a solid figure with six identical squares’. What word matches this definition?”
Continue this procedure for each term and definition.
Legend:
+: correct, including self-correction/wait time in under 3 seconds or less

~: correct, including self-correction/wait time in under 5 seconds or less

-: incorrect
Administration discussion:
The purpose of this administration was to determine whether or not the student knew the
metric vocabulary words. The definition was read to the student and the student would look at
the word bank before saying the word. Towards the end the student ended up not using the
word bank. This was because of the correction I gave the student after the 1st trial. Student
responded well to the correction. During measurement, teacher assessed the definitions in a
different order for each trial. Strengths of the measurement included the amount of trials the
student had to match the vocabulary words. A weakness of the measurement would be that
instead of understanding and knowing the definition, the student just memorized the first word
or a keyword form the definition. Allowing less time for error would be an improvement to the
measurement tool. Another improvement might be to administer less trials to the student.

Mentor Discussion:
Mentor discussed how important data collection is in measuring progress for students. We
discussed how the student utilized the amount of trials she was given. Mentor was surprised
that the student did not need the word bank after the first trial. One improvement that could
have been made was to have the student actually math the terms with word cards instead of
just verbally saying them.
Future Teaching:
The student had difficulty with just one or two words. She would get them confused and try to
memorize key words instead of actually understanding the meaning of the term. A way to teach
this is to steer away from matching because it is easy for students to become memorizers when
given matching cards. If a student is really struggling with the words you could provide a visual
representation of the word so that they student can see it from a different perspective, other
than just the definition. Conceptual models are needed to best teach this objective, especially if
the student has a hard time putting meaning behind the term and its definition.