Benchmark

A benchmark describes what a student should know and be able to do in a particular content area, grade level, or developmental level at a specified point in time. Generally, benchmarks represent shorter-term goals along a path toward mastery of content standards, learning objectives, or other longer-term educational outcomes.

Benchmarks can be used as a way to monitor student progress. At the individual level, monitoring students at various benchmarks can help students, educators, and parents make adjustments in order to help students stay on or get back on track. At an educational program level, monitoring aggregate student performance at various benchmarks can help organizations provide assistance to educators or schools in order to support student achievement.

Benchmarks can also show how much students have grown as they continue down the path toward mastery. For example, if a student is not meeting the standards at a particular benchmark but improves skills in order to meet the standards at the next benchmark, the student can be commended for showing good progress. Benchmarks can also help organizations determine program-wide progress toward goals and objectives.

To illustrate the use of benchmarks, imagine a fifth-grade student at the beginning of a school year. As the student proceeds through the math curriculum, the student’s teacher evaluates the progress of the class every 9 weeks using short assessments aligned to the content standards. After interpreting a series of assessment score reports, as well as examples of the student’s work, the teacher notices that the student is struggling to add and subtract fractions, a skill that should be mastered by that point in the school year. Noticing that a few other students were struggling in the same area, the teacher revisits adding and subtracting fractions with a subset of the class. With the extra help, the student does better on the next benchmark assessment, showing positive growth on the standards related to fractions. This positive growth is shared with the student and the student’s parents at the next conference.

Continuing with the example, leadership in the student’s district reviews the benchmark assessment results for fifth-grade math, districtwide, looking for patterns. Scores are analyzed at classroom and school levels, between schools, and even disaggregated by student characteristics. In particular, results are evaluated in the context of the district’s annual goals, which included closing of achievement gaps between student groups. Noting the intermediate progress made in fifth-grade math so far this year by various student groups, the district reports the results to the local school board along with reports of other efforts to address student equity districtwide.