Student Success
Built for Students Who Learn Differently
For schools serving students who learn differently, assessment carries a weight it doesn't carry anywhere else. Your students often arrive having already been tested — repeatedly, and badly. They've sat through long, punishing assessments pitched years above where they're working, watched every question defeat them, and learned that testing is something that happens to them. By the time they reach you, many of them shut down at the sight of a test.
True Progress was designed by a developmental psychologist for exactly these students. Every choice in its design — how long the assessment runs, how it finds a student's level, how the questions look and sound and read — exists to do one thing: measure a child accurately without re-injuring them in the process. The result is an assessment your students can actually take, that produces data you can actually use, and that treats each student as a developing learner rather than a score to be sorted.
Our Approach
A developmental approach, not a gatekeeping one
Most standardized tests were built to gatekeep — to decide who advances, who qualifies, who's admitted. That purpose shapes everything about them: fixed forms, rigid timing, no accommodation, questions calibrated to rank rather than to reveal. For a student who learns differently, that design is not neutral. It's actively harmful. It measures their disability instead of their development, and it hands you a number that tells you a child is "behind" without telling you anything about where they actually are or what they need.
True Progress is built on the opposite premise. These assessments exist to understand a student, not to rank them — to find precisely where each learner is across every dimension of a subject, so that teaching can meet them there. That developmental orientation is why schools serving students with learning differences consistently find True Progress to be a better fit than anything they've used, even when they came to it for one subject and stayed for all of them.
Assessment Experience
Assessments a struggling student can actually take
The experience of taking the assessment is the foundation of everything else, because data from a defeated, disengaged, or panicked student is worthless. Every design decision protects the integrity of that experience.
1
Brief assessments that don't overwhelm or traumatize
The screener runs about 25 minutes — one class period, closer to a worksheet than to the multi-hour ordeals your students dread. Length is not rigor. A long test given to a struggling student stops measuring skill by the halfway point and starts measuring stamina, discouragement, and the will to keep going. Short assessments, given more frequently, produce better data and a fundamentally kinder experience.
2
Computer-adaptive tests that find the student's level
The assessment adjusts as the student works — moving down when questions are too hard, up when they're too easy — so it settles quickly into each child's actual learning zone. A student is never trapped answering question after question they have no way to approach. Within the first several questions, the test has found where they are, and the rest of the experience meets them there.
3
The ability to manually assign a starting level
This is one of the most important features for your students, and one almost no other assessment offers. When you know a fifth grader is reading at a first-grade level, you can start their assessment at first grade — so they open the test to questions they can actually engage with, build confidence, and move upward from a place of success. Compare that to the alternative: a fifth grader handed fifth-grade passages, defeated on the first screen, in tears by question ten, producing data that means nothing because everyone in the room watched the child fall apart. Starting a student at the right level makes the experience fair, keeps the data valid, and — critically — lets you measure real progress from a real baseline as the year goes on.
4
Larger interactive buttons
The interface is built for young learners and students with motor and processing differences — big, clear targets that are easy to see and easy to select, so the mechanics of taking the test never get in the way of showing what a student knows.
5
Clear audio support
Text on screen is narrated — directions, content, and answer choices — so that a student's reading challenge doesn't contaminate the measurement of everything else. When you want to know how a child reasons, comprehends when listening, or works with numbers, their decoding difficulty shouldn't be what determines the score. And because the audio is deliberately structured — present in the early grades, gradually removed as skills develop — the assessment can also isolate and measure reading itself when that's what you want to see.
6
Simple, concise directions and questions
The language is stripped to its essentials. Questions are agonizingly clear. Directions are short and direct. Nothing is worded in a way that turns a math question into a hidden reading test or trips a student on the instructions rather than the content. Students come to trust an assessment that is this straightforward, and trust is what keeps them engaged.
Three Levels
Three levels of assessment — fit to each student as needed
Students who learn differently don't fit a single profile, so the system doesn't force a single test on them. Three assessments let you give each student exactly what they need.
The screener is the quick, adaptive assessment every student takes — the developmental temperature reading that shows where each learner is and how they're progressing.
The diagnostic goes deeper for the students who need it, holding at one level and asking repeated questions on the same skills to map precisely what a student has mastered and what to teach next. For a struggling reader, it separates strong listening comprehension from weak decoding, solid vocabulary from shaky phonemic awareness — so intervention targets the actual skill gap. It's the assessment that turns "behind" into a specific, teachable plan.
And the inventory is built for your most complex learners — the students whose profiles are so uneven that no single grade level can capture them.
The Inventory
The inventory: for your most complex learners
This is the assessment that matters most at schools serving students who learn differently, because it's built for exactly the students you specialize in — the ones whose learning is splintered and asynchronous, on grade level in one area, years behind in another, and sometimes years ahead in a third.
A single-level test can't see these students. Hand a child with a jagged profile one grade level of questions and you'll miss most of who they are. The inventory combines the skill-by-skill detail of the diagnostic with the full adaptive range of the screener — reaching all the way down to a pre-K level and all the way up — to find the true floor and true ceiling of every skill strand independently.
Consider a real pattern the inventory surfaces often: a student struggling in math, where everyone assumed the problem was math. The inventory revealed grade-level and even advanced performance in computation, geometry, and graphing — and a first-grade level only on the language of math. The child didn't need a math intervention. They needed language support. A single summary score would have sent that student down the wrong path for a year; the inventory pointed to the right one. That is the kind of clarity your students need and rarely get — and it's often the difference between an intervention that works and one that misses the actual need entirely.
The inventory takes longer than the other assessments because it's doing something harder: locating a student precisely across a profile that spans years. You won't give it to everyone. But for the students whose needs have never quite been captured — the ones your team has puzzled over in meeting after meeting — it can finally show you exactly where they are and exactly where to begin.
See it with your own students
The best way to understand what True Progress offers is to watch it work on the students you know — to see a child who usually shuts down at a test actually engage with one, and to see the data finally reflect who they are. Most schools begin with a low-stakes pilot year: we help you put the system in place, you see your own students more clearly than you have before, and you decide for yourself what changes.
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