Washoe Country School District
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Aimsweb/Progress Monitoring
What is Aimsweb?
Aimsweb is a 3-tier Progress Monitoring System based on direct, frequent and continuous student assessment which is reported to students, parents, teachers, and administrators via a web-based data management and reporting system for the purpose of determining response to instruction.
What are Benchmark Assessments?
Benchmark Assessments occur three times each school year: fall, winter, and spring. All students on a general education teacher's class roster, excluding those students who do not have physical skills to participate meaningfully, are given the benchmark assessments at their grade level. Benchmark assessments provide teachers, administrators, and parents information to make decisions about growth and development of basic skills.
What is progress monitoring?
Progress Monitoring is a continuous assessment, information management and improvement reporting system designed for frequent monitoring of progress for students at risk or with severe needs. Based on individual goals, expected rates of progress are prescribed and compared to actual rates of progress, allowing fine tuning of the instructional approach to maximize improvement. Progress Monitoring is done weekly or every two weeks.
What is Strategic Monitoring?
Strategic Monitoring is the same as progress monitoring but students are monitored on a monthly basis.
What areas are tested by Aimsweb?
Aimsweb consists of a variety of tests:
- R-CBM (reading fluency)
- MAZE (reading comprehension)
- M-CBM (math computational skills)
- S-CBM (spelling)
- WE-CWS (writing, correct word sequences)
- LNF (letter name fluency)
- LSF (letter sound fluency)
- PSF (phoneme segmentation fluency)
- NWF (nonsense word fluency)
- OCM (oral counting measure)
- NIM (number identification measure)
- QDM (quantity discrimination measure)
- MNM (missing number measure).
There are also specific tests to measure math skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. These tests are administered in quick intervals to minimize interruptions to teachers work days.
Each test is timed.
All reading (R-CBM), Early Literacy (LNF, LSF, PSF, NWF), and Early Numeracy (OCM, NIM, QDM, MNM) subtests are given in one minute.
The MAZE is given in 3 minutes.
Spelling (S-CBM)
Grades 1-2: Students are given 2 minutes with a new word every 10 seconds
Grades 3-8: Students are given 2 minutes with a new word every 7 seconds.
Math (M-CBM), grades 1-3 are given 2 minutes and grades 4-8 are given 4 minutes.
Writing (WE-CWS), all students are given 1 minute to think about the topic and 3 minutes to write.
