Curriculum-Based Measures: Development and Perspectives

Abstract

Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) is an approach to measuring the academic growth of individual students. The essential purpose of CBM is to aid teachers in evaluating the effectiveness of the instruction they provide to individual students. While early research focused on the utility and effectiveness of CBM for increasing the achievement of students with learning disabilities, extensions of CBM research now address a broad range of educational issues in both special and general education with different populations and in new curriculum domains. This article provides a brief history of CBM clarifying its relationship to curriculum-based assessment, a summary of the primary features of CBM, and a rationale for its design. Extensions of CBM to new research domains are identified, and a perspective is provided on the place of CBM in the broader context of educational assessment.