Collecting data for math intervention does not need to be an overcomplicated task! There are a few types of data you need to make sure you are collecting that will allow you to feel confident in your assessment strategy.
3 Types of Math Intervention Assessment Data
A challenge when it comes to finding the *perfect* assessment or progress monitor tool is that one tool will not give you all of the information you need. Therefore, the perfect assessment does not exist.
Instead, you need to have a suite of assessments that will provide you with the information you need. You will want to know how your students are progressing relative to their grade level standards and grade level peers, whether or not your students are making progress on the specific skills you are targeting in math intervention lessons and whether or not your students are making progress towards their fact fluency goals.
- Big Picture Screeners / Grade Level Data
- Strategy Growth Over Time
- Fact Fluency Growth Over Time
Why these three pieces of data? Because these are the pieces of information you will need to inform your instruction AND advocate for your students.
Big Picture Data
“Big Picture Data” refers to the tier 1 data being collected on all students. This might include screening assessments being used by your entire district and/or unit assessments being given in the classroom.
This information is important to your data strategy because it allows you to advocate for your students as needed throughout the year. You can see how your students are performing relative to their peers and you can also see whether or not they are meeting standards on assessments throughout the year.
If you ever find yourself at a grade level meeting, student data meeting or conference you will be able to refer to this data to confidently state that your students are consistently meeting, exceeding or working towards standards. You will also have multiple data points to back up this point of view!
This data can also be used to choose which students will be seen for interventions and which students might need to be progress monitored or “kept on the radar” so that they don’t fall through the cracks later on in the school year.
Intervention Strategy Data
In your intervention groups, whether that be tier 2 or tier 3, you will be working on targeted skills with your students. Again, you want to be able to clearly demonstrate that your students are meeting or working towards those goals on a consistent basis.
For this, I like to use a pre assessment and post assessment for each skill or topic addressed. These assessments directly mirror one another and are a quick way to show growth in a concrete way.
This information is two fold. First, you can again use this data to advocate for your students. If you are working with 8 different students for math intervention with 7 showing significant growth on the final assessment and 1 failing to make growth, you can use that data to demonstrate that your student may need a new level of support. If you can show that pattern across multiple units your case is stronger yet.
The second reason for this information is to inform your instruction! If you get to the end of your unit and half of your students are still struggling with the content, you will know that you need to spend more time on that content before moving ahead.
I do add in another piece to avoid this outcome– I progress monitor with a daily exit ticket relative to the intervention skills being targeted so that there is not a case where a student gets to the end of the unit without demonstrating understanding of the material. If you are progress monitoring daily you will be able to inform your instruction in a way that allows you to make adjustments and changes in real time so that all students are successful.
Fact Fluency Data
Finally, I like to keep data on students fact fluency over time. Much of your fact fluency instruction is likely embedded within your math intervention lessons, but it is nice to be able to see your student’s progress towards their fact fluency goals at a glance.
The purpose again is two-fold. First, this data will be useful if you are ever in a data meeting or conference and you ened to advocate for your student.
Second, this information will allow for you to tailor your instruction to the strategies and fact relationships your students need to improve their overall fact fluency. This blog post goes into more detail around an overall fact fluency strategy!
Math Intervention Resources From The Math Spot
