is an assessment system designed to give teachers insight into which of their students may need additional instructional support as well as to provide a means by which they can measure the effectiveness of their teaching. With three different versions (Lite, Deluxe, and District) there’s one to fit your classroom needs. To learn more about our program, please visit us at: easyCBM.com. For specific research regarding these programs, please refer to the Publications section of this website for articles and technical reports.
Head of the class: Innovators set College of Ed apart (easyCBM)
UO Faculty Have Been Measuring Education Effectiveness for Decades…
One of the flagship assessment tools developed by researchers at the UO is easyCBM, nationally recognized as a leader in learning assessments. The system includes a variety of reading, Spanish language literacy, and math assessments to screen K-8 students at risk of falling below grade-level expectations, as well as sensitive measures to monitor progress over time.
“easyCBM gives teachers a system for monitoring kids’ progress, particularly those with disabilities, to measure program effectiveness and if it’s not effective, determine how it could be changed,” said Gerald “JT” Tindal, emeritus professor of education and director of Behavioral Research and Teaching (BRT).
Before the development of easyCBM, many teachers across the country were devising their own systems of measurement to monitor student progress. But the variation from one teacher to another made it difficult to track learning gains year to year. That is, “If you want to measure change, you can’t change your measures,” he said. “This system has 50 years of research to back it up.”
“This product was developed because educators were asking for it,” said Raina Megert, BRT research coordinator of finance and operations. “Screening for risk to figure out which kids may not be meeting benchmarks, identifying skill gaps, and finally measuring student progress—these are some of the reasons teachers were excited about this product.”
Tindal added that BRT researchers worked with the local school districts to directly integrate feedback from teachers in the development of easyCBM.
BRT has also developed two other assessments in the CBM suite: CBMSkills and WriteRightNow. CBMSkills assessments measure students’ skills in discrete content rather than cutting across compilations of skills and provide teachers with diagnostic information to pinpoint specific skills students have mastered and need to master. WriteRightNow makes it easy for teachers to provide individualized writing feedback for all students, particularly those with special needs and English learners. Automatic scoring and a feedback library expedite grading and encourages students to engage in meaningful revisions.
easyCBM, launched in 2011, is the culmination of decades of longitudinal research and is now used by 250,000 elementary and middle school teachers across the nation with more than one million students. It has generated more than $8 million in revenue that has been reinvested directly in the research and development to improve and expand the CBM suite in BRT.
For school districts that cannot afford district-wide licenses, BRT makes individual classroom licenses available, as well as offering a free version of the software.
“Making learning public and transparent is the key to effective teaching” Tindal said. “There is so much individual variation in classroom learning that it’s no wonder teachers are overwhelmed. As kids go through the grades, this variation in learning becomes even greater. Therefore, it is important to navigate this situation publicly, allowing teachers to work together. These assessment tools provide transparency and accountability at the kid level. Ensuring that kids learn can’t happen without public, transparent openness about what it is that we are measuring and what it is that kids are learning.”