Student Success
Built for Students Who Learn Differently
Schools serving students who learn differently know that strengths and difficulties rarely line up neatly. A student may reason at a high level while struggling with a particular foundation, language demand, learning condition, or way of demonstrating understanding. The visible difficulty is not always the underlying need.
True Progress helps schools bring teacher and specialist knowledge, student and family perspectives, assessment, and progress over time into a shared understanding of the learner. The Student Success System connects that understanding with curriculum, instruction, intervention, and review so the school can identify what the student needs and determine whether its response is helping.
Our Approach
A developmental approach to student success
Knowing a student includes how they experience learning, the strengths they can draw on, what gets in the way, and what previous support has made possible. That understanding develops through the school's work with the student.
The Student Success System connects five drivers: Visibility, Focused Curriculum, Instruction, Meaningful Data, and Workflows. Together, they support the school in developing its understanding, responding to the student, and examining what is helping.
Visibility
Visibility brings together the knowledge of teachers, specialists, students, and families with classroom work, assessment, and progress over time. No single source is expected to explain the whole learner.
Educators consider where those sources agree, where they differ, and what the differences suggest they should explore. Strengths, interests, ambitions, specific learning difficulties, conditions for learning, and the student's own experience all contribute to the school's developing understanding.
1
Brief and adaptive
The Screener takes approximately 25 minutes and adjusts question difficulty as the student responds, allowing the assessment to explore learning above or below the assigned grade without requiring a long testing session.
2
Appropriate starting points
Educators can select a starting level using what they know about the student. A fifth grader working with first-grade ELA material can begin there rather than first encountering a long sequence of inaccessible questions.
3
Clear presentation
Large answer buttons, concise directions, and direct question wording reduce unnecessary interface and language demands so students can focus more fully on the learning being assessed.
4
Audio narration for math
Audio narration is available for all math questions so students can hear the language of the question while demonstrating their mathematical understanding.
Three assessments for different questions
Assessment becomes more detailed when the educational question requires more detail.
Screener: A brief, adaptive view of ELA or math learning and progress used periodically with every student.
Diagnostic: A focused examination of skill mastery at a selected level when educators need to understand a particular area more closely.
Inventory: A deeper examination of individual learning dimensions across levels when an uneven or complex profile requires more detailed investigation.
More assessment is not automatically better. The purpose is to gather the evidence needed to understand the educational question in front of the team.
Understanding an uneven learning profile
The Inventory explores learning across individual domains, allowing strengths and needs at different grade levels to emerge. It takes longer than the Screener and is used when a more detailed profile is needed.
An Inventory might show strengths in computation, geometry, and graphing alongside difficulty with the language of math. That pattern gives the team a specific area to investigate: how language demands may be affecting the student's access to work they otherwise understand.
The team brings those findings together with classroom observations, the student's experience, and previous responses to support. It can investigate the language demands while preserving appropriate mathematical challenge.
Focused Curriculum
Intervention has a curriculum too: a learning aim, a starting point, and a sequence that develops understanding over time. Focused Curriculum helps educators identify the particular foundation that needs attention and connect that learning with the student's wider education. A student should not have to exchange intellectual challenge for foundational support. In the example above, the school can address mathematical language while continuing to provide demanding mathematical reasoning and problem solving.
Instruction
Through Formative Teaching, teachers and specialists adjust instruction, practice, feedback, and challenge in response to what the student understands and needs next. How the student responds becomes further evidence. An error, successful attempt, explanation, or change in independence can confirm the team's understanding or give it reason to reconsider. Instruction therefore becomes part of how the school continues learning about the student.
Meaningful Data
Meaningful Data brings the school back to the central question: is the student becoming more capable? Educators examine progress alongside classroom work, independence, and the student's experience. An accommodation may improve access without changing the underlying learning. An intervention may produce success during a support session without yet transferring to classroom work. Those distinctions help the team decide what to continue, change, or investigate further.
Workflows
Students who learn differently often work with several adults across multiple settings. Workflows clarify the learning aim, who will carry each part of the response forward, what teachers and specialists need to share, and when the team will return to the student's learning. Strengths, effective approaches, current aims, and unresolved questions carry forward across classrooms and transitions so the next educator can build on what the school has already learned rather than rediscovering it.
Partnership
Working with your school
True Progress works with leadership, teachers, and specialists on the students in front of them. Professional learning and coaching help teams interpret what they are learning, coordinate a response, and review whether it is helping.
Founder David Stevens earned his doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and has spent his career working on learning and support for students who learn differently.
Trusted by pioneering LD-focused schools
See it with your own students
A no-fee, 90-day Visibility Pilot lets your school begin with one classroom or one grade level. Two assessment windows give faculty and leadership the opportunity to examine the assessment experience and what the results reveal about students' learning and progress.
Your team can consider what the findings add to its understanding of students and how the wider Student Success System could support its response.