Capitalizing on Curriculum-Based Measurement for Reading: Collaboration Within a Response to Instruction Framework

Response to Instruction (RTI) frameworks provide a structure for assessing student progress and evaluating the effectiveness of reading interventions. Schools frequently use RTI to support students who are struggling with learning to read while utilizing curriculum-based measurement (CBM) to monitor performance and guide instructional decisions made by collaborative teams of school professionals. Although these measures are relatively quick to administer, their usage is often limited to rate and accuracy scores to identify struggling students and monitor oral reading fluency. As schools make substantial investments to collect the assessment data, it is important to consider what else might be understood about struggling readers from this individually administered reading assessment. In this article we describe how to assess students' prosody and word recognition errors to inform school professionals about students' needs. This additional data from CBMs can inform the collaboration among school professionals to plan more targeted instruction for struggling readers.