Making the Most of Community-Based Instruction: Progress Monitoring for Strategic Decision Making

Community-based instruction (CBI) provides students with important opportunities to learn and generalize skills outside of school. However, in order to assess if students are making progress towards instructional goals in the community, it is important for educators to implement data-driven decision-making during CBI. This allows educators to determine if current instructional methods are working or if changes need to be made to better promote the learning of each student. Given that research on progress monitoring focuses on classroom instruction, educators who provide CBI would benefit from understanding how they can apply these research-based approaches for tracking student growth and making instructional decisions in the community. This article describes how educators can engage in the progress monitoring process by 1) identifying goals, 2) selecting a progress monitoring tool, 3) collecting student data and 4) applying data-driven decision making to adjust instruction. This article demonstrates each step with a vignette and includes figures illustrating an online progress monitoring tracker that educators can use to automatically visualize their data over time.