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Baseline

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A baseline is a student's measured performance on a skill before instruction toward a new goal begins, used as the goal's starting point.

Topic: The IEP document

In plain terms

A baseline answers the question "where is the student now?" with a number. It is collected the same way progress will be measured later: the same kind of task, the same conditions, and the same unit, such as words correct per minute or percent of opportunities. Most teams take at least three data points on different days so one good or bad day does not set the starting line.

How it shows up in an IEP

The baseline usually appears in the present levels and again in the goal. Without it, the team cannot judge whether a target is ambitious or out of reach, and a progress report has nothing to compare against. If the baseline and the goal use different measures, progress cannot be read honestly.

Example

Before writing a fluency goal, a teacher gives three grade-level passages over one week. The student reads 42, 47 and 45 words correct per minute, so the IEP records a baseline of 45 WCPM, the median.

Related terms

  • PLAAFP (present levels of academic achievement and functional performance)The PLAAFP is the IEP section that describes how a student is currently doing in school and how the disability affects progress in the general curriculum.
  • Measurable annual goalA measurable annual goal is an IEP goal written so that two different people could observe the student and agree on whether it was met.
  • Progress monitoringProgress monitoring is the regular, repeated measurement of a student's performance on a skill to check whether instruction is working.
  • WCPM (words correct per minute)WCPM is the number of words a student reads correctly in one minute from a passage, used to measure oral reading fluency.
  • ProbeA probe is a brief check of a skill, given without teaching or help, to see what the student can do independently at that moment.

On IEP Atlas

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