By combining Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) with regular meetings with students individually (to provide a safe place to talk openly) a school can not only find a proportion of students who struggle with chronic academic failure (CAF) but also systematically work to dwindle those numbers. CAF characteristic include a student feeling lonely, depressed, or the need to rebel against social rules. (Marinez, Nellis pg. 144) These personal issues correspond with poor academic results. Because of this a school could use a mixture of professional (CBM) and personal (meetings) tactics to keep track of theses problems.
CBM is a highly structured way to keep track of the academic portion of helping the students. It monitors the children by using skills and tools. Examples of skills include letter sound fluency and nonsense word fluency. (Marinez, Nellis pg. 151) These tools are especially helpful for students early on in their career. It can help stop and locate any signs of academic problems. By locating these problems, teachers can use tools such as charts to monitor their progress. (Marinez, Nellis pg. 152) This link http://rti4success.org/progressMonitoringTools is an example of a chart that measures the performance of students. With questions or comments about RTI, CBM, or general questions helpful websites and forums such as http://www.rti4success.org/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=22 will be more than beneficial.
Professional measures only go so far in monitoring and helping students in early in their academic careers. Since signs such as “loneliness” and “depression” come along with CAF, teachers and staff should meet with them as a way to check how they doing with academics. These meets could involve asking the students for suggestions in how they can learn better or what is helpful for them. Then after these meetings, teachers can jot down helpful notes about the progression. This would be beneficial because “establishing and maintaining a rapport among [students], formulating a sense of trust and respect among [students]…” helps them feel more comfortable to open up. (Marinez, Nellis pg. 157)
This method of charting personal and professional techniques, schools should have a good indication of how their students are doing. A common goal among teachers is to help and “be there” for students so that they can learn and improve. By getting a good idea of the proportion of students suffering from CAF, this goal could be one step forward to being fulfilled.
