What is the difference between a Moderate goal and an Aggressive goal?

What is the difference between a Moderate goal and an Aggressive goal?

Setting a moderate or aggressive goal reflects how many points of growth you want for your student during the progress monitoring session. If you feel your student can achieve a great deal of growth you may select aggressive, if not you would select moderate. Either option is acceptable and the choice can be modified at any time. Below we will define the difference between a moderate and aggressive goal for both Domain Based and Curriculum Sampling probes.

Domain Based CBMs

Domain based CBM probes are scored on a 0-100% scale. For Domain-based goals, a moderate goal has an expectation that the student will reach 70% by the end of 12-weeks and an aggressive goal has an expectation that the student will reach 80% by the end of 12-weeks.

For example, this student scored a 53% on their first completed probe (week 1).

When set to moderate (a goal of reaching 70%), we would expect the student to increase their score by 1.5454% each week, for the next 11 weeks. If they are on target, this would put them right at 70% at the end of their progress monitoring session.

You can see if we alter this to be an aggressive goal (reaching 80% by the end of 12 weeks), this weekly goal increases to 2.4546% each week.



Curriculum Sampling

Curriculum Sampling CBM scores are on the same scale as our Universal Screener to help identify student grade-level readiness. With Curriculum Sampling CBMs, Classworks takes the student's first score, identifies their current grade-level readiness (using the Universal Screener Scaled score here), and then uses that same table to determine what their target score will be at the end of the 12 weeks.


Moderate Goal

If they are set at a moderate goal, Classworks will take the initial score, and make their target goal the next target score on the Scaled Score Table. For example, this student scored a 420 on their first Language Arts probe, which they took at week 1.


Looking at the Scaled Score Table, at a moderate goal, we would want the student to reach the next target score of 465. To reach this goal, the student would need to improve by 4.0909 points per week for the remaining 11 weeks. If they are on target, this would put them right at 465 at the end of their progress monitoring session.

Aggressive Goal

If they are set at an aggressive goal, Classworks will take the initial score, and make their target goal two target scores up on the Scaled Score Table. For example, this student scored a 420 on their first Language Arts probe, which they took at week 1.


Looking at the Scaled Score Table, at an aggressive goal, we would want the student to reach two target scores up on the table, making their goal 510. To reach this goal, the student would need to improve by 8.1818 points per week for the remaining 11 weeks. If they are on target, this would put them right at 510 at the end of their progress monitoring session.