Even though there is already much research and good practice regarding inclusive education, there are also still schools and cases where students struggle with academic skills. Progress monitoring (PM) is an effective approach to provide direct feedback in school practice. The idea of PM is to document learning development and provide feedback on instructional decisions and interventions over time using repeated short reliable standardized tests. PM is a form of formative diagnostics that measures and evaluates learning development at multiple points in time and provides direct feedback to teachers and learners. Formative diagnostics measure for the purpose of supporting learning rather than to evaluate learning outcomes or determine special educational needs.

PM enables the observation of learning development and allows formative constructive feedback, which is a necessary condition for inclusive schools and the support of students with special educational needs. Without Progress monitoring, there is a risk that students with special educational needs will be evaluated based on their performance relative to their classmates rather than their progress.

According to current research there are positive effects of using PM on students achievement, but the use of PM is not widespread. This may be due to additional work for teachers and a lack of knowledge on how to use PM in context of data-based decision making. Similarly, tests or online platforms for PM are not available in many countries and languages.

Tests for PM must provide the psychometric quality to measure learning progress in addition to the psychometric quality criteria for status tests. For this purpose, classical test theory is usually no longer sufficient, since learning trajectories differ among students. The tests must be fair over time both for an individual level and for specific groups of students (measurement invariance) and measure learning trajectories sensitively (i.e., be sensitive to change even for weak learners). On the other hand, the tests must be as short and easy to use as possible, so that the tests can be used frequently enough in everyday teaching. Thus, the criterion of usefulness, practicability as well as economy is of crucial importance. This is because PM can only be effective when teachers reflect on their decisions based on the new information provided by PM. Compared to status tests, the requirements of PM are thus much higher, both psychometrically and in terms of practical implementation. Therefore, it makes sense for PM to be flanked by adapted materials and recommendation to support teachers and students.

The goal of this Research Topic is to provide a set of research articles that presents empirical or methodological studies on progress monitoring. We invite manuscripts that use standard methods of test construction in education research, as well as those that use novel analytical techniques to provide new insights into the data from example self-developed online platforms.

We welcome papers that focus on test construction and implementation of PM in schools. We encourage article submissions from collaborations between different scientists from the fields of computer science, psychology, education and special education. Submissions related to this main theme and below specific themes are all welcome:
- Test construction and psychometric qualities for students in inclusive schools and students with special educational needs
- Construction of web-platforms for progress monitoring, data collection and feedback to the teachers
- Single Case studies with progress monitoring
- Teacher Trainings for progress monitoring and diagnostic competence to interpret growth data

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Frontiers in Education

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