Each IEP you write is individualized, that’s the purpose of an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for our students with special needs.
When you are writing IEP goals, you shouldn’t be using one standard measurement for skill mastery. The IEP goal trials also don’t have to be one specific amount of problems or questions per progress monitoring session.
If you’re not sure how to determine how many trials per IEP goal – check this out.
Let me explain. For example, let’s pretend this is your student’s IEP goal:
Given 20 flash cards of Dolch Primer sight words, the student will be able to identify and fluently read each sight word with 75% accuracy in 3 of 5 trials.
The active scenario – we are back in the classroom waiting to begin Guided Reading, but students are still coming back from specials. This transition time is a great quick minute or two to assess a student on the given IEP goal above.
I grab a sticky note to keep data or I write on the back of the flash card, how many words the student got correct… but we did not have time to have the full IEP goal trials of 20 flash cards. We only got through 13.
No big.
Out of the 13 sight words, the student was able to identify and fluently read 11 sight words. That’s 11/13.
I turn the 11/13 into a fraction, which I then can turn into a percent.
Once I have the percentage… which would be 85% for these IEP goal trials, then I will look to see if that meets the mastery criteria of the goal. In the example, the mastery criteria is 75%, so with 11/13 the student would have met the mastery criteria for that set of trials.
On the student’s Progress Monitoring Data Ring, I would also write on the back of that specific IEP goal sheet that this specific trial included 13 flash cards. This is important information that can skew overall data because of how the IEP goal is written (20 flash cards). This information would then be mentioned when it comes time to write progress reports for the marking period or semester.
