Student Success
Built for Students Who Learn Differently
Schools serving students who learn differently place a particular priority on knowing each student deeply. Strengths and difficulties may sit side by side, and an explanation that once seemed sufficient may leave important needs unrecognized.
True Progress works with schools that make understanding these students their central commitment. The Student Success System helps educators deepen that understanding, develop the school's response, and keep examining whether the student is receiving the help and challenge they need.
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 True Progress assessment findings together with the knowledge of teachers, specialists, students, and families. It supports a developing understanding of the student's strengths, needs, and experience.
The assessment itself is designed to help students show what they know. The following features support that experience.
1
Brief assessments
The Screener takes approximately 25 minutes, making regular assessment practical without setting aside long testing blocks.
2
Adaptive question difficulty
The Screener adjusts question difficulty as the student responds, exploring learning above or below the assigned grade.
3
Educator-selected starting points
Educators can choose a starting level using their knowledge of the student. A fifth grader working with first-grade ELA material can begin there, allowing the assessment to explore learning from an appropriate starting point.
4
Clear interactive buttons
Large, clearly defined buttons make answer choices easier to see and select, reducing the interface demands involved in responding.
5
Audio narration for math
Audio narration is available for all math questions, so students can hear the language of the question as they consider their answer.
6
Concise directions and questions
Brief directions and direct question wording help students focus on the task. The assessment is designed to reduce unnecessary language and navigation demands.
Three assessments for different questions
Educators choose the assessment that can add the information they need about the student.
Screener: A brief, adaptive view of ELA or math learning, used at regular intervals with every student to examine learning and progress.
Diagnostic: A focused look at skill mastery at a selected level, helping educators identify secure learning and areas needing closer attention.
Inventory: An assessment that explores each learning domain independently, helping educators see strengths and needs that extend across grade levels.
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
Use what the school is learning about the student to provide foundations, depth, and challenge. In the example above, the team can preserve demanding mathematical work while addressing the language needed to participate fully.
Instruction
Through Formative Teaching, teachers and specialists respond as learning unfolds, adjusting explanations, questions, feedback, and challenge. Their response draws on the student's strengths, reflections, and experience, with attention to confidence and growing independence.
Meaningful Data
Return to evidence of the student's learning and experience to see whether the response is helping. In this example, that includes whether the student is using mathematical language more successfully and progressing in their math learning.
Workflows
Agree how the response will be carried through, who will stay in contact with the student and family, and when the team will review what is happening. Carry that understanding across classrooms and transitions.
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.