Progress Monitoring for Students With Hearing Loss

Progress monitoring helps determine whether students with hearing loss are making academic gains equal to their peers. Regular assessment of learning, language development, device use, and communication access is needed to know if full access is truly happening.

Progress Monitoring: Are Gains Equal to Peers?

Hearing loss is a barrier that limits access to ongoing communication in the environment. For students who are hard of hearing, this means that they do not perceive 90% or more of speech, especially if it occurs beyond the 3-6 foot range. Decreased speech perception translates into decreased comprehension, especially of novel words and new information. For students who are deaf and visual communicators, most only receive communication from their classroom interpreter, with little meaningful conversation or information exchange directly with peers. Progress through the curriculum at the same rate as class peers with typical hearing assumes that the student has received the same information as those peers. It’s all about access!

We need to not only strive to close language and learning gaps; we need to simultaneously support our students in keeping up with the day-to-day learning in the classroom. We MUST monitor progress to know if full access is truly occurring and to ensure that our students are keeping pace with classroom expectations. Without appropriate support, the trajectory of educational performance shown above is all too likely. Students who are deaf or hard of hearing with no other learning issues – with full access to school communication – CAN progress at the expected rate IF they are receiving the appropriate intensity of focused support.

What Data Should Be Used in Progress Monitoring?

• Norm-referenced test results (high-stakes tests, language evaluations).
• Percentile scores over time.
• Curriculum-based measures (weekly/monthly).
• Communication development checklists (e.g., for expressive vocabulary).
• Functional listening evaluations.
• Daily records of hearing technology use.
• Teacher observations and reports.
• Parent input and language surveys.
• IEP goal progress.
• Social-emotional and self-advocacy measures.

Monitor and Compare: Progress from Year-to-Year

Review your student files semi-annually for young children and annually for school-age students. Specifically, look at norm-referenced test results, like the high-stakes tests or language evaluations. Have the students’ percentile scores stayed constant? With your focused intervention and appropriate supports, have the student’s percentile scores improved? Or, as the figure above depicts, has the student experienced inappropriate access issues and insufficient support, causing a decrease in performance over time?

For example, consider a student who scored in overall reading in grade 2 at the 48^th percentile, at the 38th percentile in grade 3, and at the 30^th percentile in grade 5. The student still continues to fall within 1 standard deviation from the mean, or within the ‘average’ range. However, a drop of 18 percentile points over 3 years certainly raises the question about adequate yearly progress and if the access accommodations and services have truly ‘leveled the playing field’ for the student with hearing loss. The school team may not be concerned because the student still scores ‘average,’ but to a professional with a background in the impact of hearing loss on learning, this trend should demand that more focused and appropriate supports/access accommodations be provided.

Infants and Toddlers

An integral part of early intervention services includes monitoring the growth in skill development for young children with hearing loss. If a child was identified at birth and received amplification/intervention within a couple of months, then the goal is one month of development per one month of age. If the hearing loss was identified and amplification/intervention was not provided until 3 months or later, then the goal is more than one month of growth per one month of age. If a child with a delay only gains 6 months of development in a 6-month period, then he or she will never catch up to age peers by school entry.

The following are resources that can be used by interventionists/parents to track skill growth over time.

• Communication Development Monitoring. Checklists for parents of children ages 8-36 months to complete every 6 months to track expressive vocabulary growth as compared to typically developing peers. Checklists can hang on the refrigerator as a reminder to families about words appropriate for them to include in daily conversations. It will also be handy to mark when a word has been learned. Graphs for boys and girls show growth via percentile ranks. Scoring examples are also posted to assist in identifying the growth in months for every 6-month period.

Auditory Skills Checklist 1. Auditory Skills Checklist 2.– Approximately 85% of children with hearing loss have hearing loss of 70 dB or better. Of the approximately 15% who have 71-110+ dB hearing loss, about half receive cochlear implants. Finally, based on one state’s 2013 data (NC), of the families who chose a communication option, 92% chose spoken language for their children. Only 2% chose ASL, and 6% chose simultaneous communication. Fewer than 1% chose Cued Speech. Based on these results, it is clear that for the vast majority of children, growth in auditory skill development is very, very important to their future success and should be diligently tracked from infancy.

• ASL Development for those families and children who use sign language: skill development should also be monitored. Information on this webpage includes an extensive developmental checklist for ASL skills. Once a child is in kindergarten, the ASL Content Standards below should be used as a guide to development.

• Pragmatics Checklist – As children transition from early intervention, it is critical to determine language performance in all areas. Pragmatics is often overlooked. Pragmatics, or social communication, will not develop at a typical rate or in the same way for children with hearing loss unless addressed. It is typical for a 7-year-old with hearing loss to have the pragmatic skills of a 3-year-old!

• Hearing aid use and independence are concerns, even for our youngest children with hearing loss. Families need to develop confidence in monitoring hearing devices and supporting full-time use. Strategies for Keeping Hearing Aids On and Achieving Effective Hearing Aid Use in Early Childhood serve as resources to assist in these goals.

School Age

NEW! ASL Content Standards—K–12. Developed by Gallaudet, these comprehensive standards are truly impressive! They were developed to ensure that deaf and hard-of-hearing children acquire and learn ASL in much the same way that hearing children in the US acquire and learn English. Whichever communication modality is used by a student, he or she must have the prerequisite skills to adequately communicate both receptively and expressively. Most families at this point prefer that their child learn to listen and speak. This preference does not always result in a child who has school-entry skills. Whether the family has chosen to use sign from birth or it is the modality deemed to be most effective for learning by a school team due to the child’s lack of progress in learning to listen and speak, a student must progress through learning ASL in a developmental sequence to prepare them to make academic gains at least at the rate of their class peers. The ASL Content Standards for K-12 grade students are a huge step forward in determining the instruction needed and progress monitoring of ASL knowledge and use.

CURRICULUM-BASED MEASURES: There is a need for functional assessments to monitor students’ academic performance. Curriculum-based measures provide a specific approach to measuring student learning that includes repeated measurement (weekly, monthly) across extended periods of time using general outcome indicators that are sensitive in the rate of change demonstrated in the performance of a task of the same difficulty. While curriculum-based measures (CBM) have been commonly used in public education, it is appropriate to consider CBM use for students who are deaf/hard of hearing specifically. Developed as part of a grant from the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs, the University of Minnesota has developed extensive progress CBM materials designed specifically for teachers of the deaf/hard of hearing to monitor students who have hearing loss and/or language differences.

Go to the Education Resources for Teachers of Deaf/Hard of Hearing Students resource page for extensive training resources for teachers and specific means to monitor student progress. This truly is an amazing resource and would be great for professional learning collaboratives or self-study. The measures take only a few minutes each week!

MAZE ASSESSMENT: Monitoring performance via the MAZE assessment is a common form of curriculum-based measurement. Maze presents sentences or short stories with every 7th word missing. The student must select which of 3 words best fits the missing word in the sentence. Clearly, as can be seen in the bar graph, even our students with hearing loss who do not have IEP services and supports are not performing like their age peers. Learn more about creating MAZE reading passages here.

Progress Monitoring of Expanded Core Skills

Expanded core curriculum refers to those skills that students with hearing loss need to learn to be able to access the general education curriculum and fully participate. Even if a student is provided access to effective communication as required by Title II of the ADA, he or she still needs to learn the skills to independently and confidently navigate as a person with hearing loss in a mainstream setting. These areas will not be taught specifically, and yet they must be learned if full participation in the classroom is expected.

Per the Iowa Expanded Core Curriculum guidance, hearing loss adds a dimension to learning that requires explicit teaching, such as information gained through incidental learning. It has been estimated that for persons without hearing loss, 80% of information learned is acquired incidentally. No effort is required. Any type of hearing loss interrupts this automatic path to gain information. This incidental information must be delivered directly to students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Most teachers without specialized training related to hearing loss do not have the expertise to address the unique needs of students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Therefore, IFSP & IEP team collaboration with educational audiologists and teachers of students who are deaf or hard of hearing is necessary in addressing academic and social instruction and the assessment of these areas. In order to close this information gap, the Expanded Core Curriculum for Students who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (ECC-DHH) was developed. Texas has developed a Livebinder with extensive information about ECC and resources to support implementation.

Frequently Asked Questions About Progress Monitoring for Students with Hearing Loss

What is progress monitoring for students with hearing loss?
Progress monitoring is the systematic process of regularly tracking a student’s academic growth, language development, and classroom participation. For students who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), it specifically measures whether their specialized accommodations and assistive technologies are providing truly equal access to the curriculum.

Can students with hearing loss make academic progress equal to their hearing peers?
Yes. Students with hearing loss are entirely capable of achieving the same academic growth rates as their typically hearing peers. However, this pace relies on full, uninterrupted communication access, appropriate instructional intensity, and proactive tracking to catch learning gaps before they widen.

Why is routine progress tracking critical for DHH students?
Hearing loss creates an “invisible barrier” to incidental learning and classroom communication. Without rigorous progress monitoring, a student’s performance can drop significantly across school years (e.g., slipping from the 48th to the 30th percentile) while technically remaining in the “average” range, causing critical access issues to go unnoticed by the school team.

What specific tracking tools and data should school teams utilize?
Comprehensive progress monitoring should blend general academic indicators with specialized DHH diagnostic tools, including:

• Curriculum-Based Measures (CBMs): Short, frequent checks like MAZE reading assessments to track ongoing skill development.
• Functional Listening Evaluations (FLE): Appraisals that measure speech perception across different classroom acoustics and noise levels.
• Avenue PM: A dedicated online progress monitoring platform designed specifically for students who are deaf or hard of hearing.
• Daily Device Records: Objective tracking of hearing aid, cochlear implant, and FM/DM system usage and compliance.
• Norm-Referenced Standardized Data: Monitoring long-term percentile trends from year to year.

What are the warning signs that a student lacks full classroom communication access?
When accommodations or listening systems are insufficient, a student may exhibit the following:

• A downward trend in percentile scores over multiple years.
• Pronounced listening fatigue, behavioral withdrawal, or a drop in daily classroom participation.
• Frequent misunderstandings of instructional directions or delayed social-pragmatic language.
• An expanding achievement gap between themselves and their classroom grade-mates.

How often should a student’s educational progress be evaluated?
The tracking frequency depends entirely on the student’s age, individual goals, and specific areas of concern:

• Curriculum-Based Measures (CBMs): Administered weekly or monthly to capture responsive, real-time data.
• Infants & Toddlers (Early Intervention): Tracked at least every 6 months to ensure developmental growth exceeds one month of skill per month of age to close early language gaps.
• School-Age Standardized Metrics: Reviewed annually by the IEP team to assess overall trajectory and placement effectiveness.

How do IEP teams use this progress data to adjust support?
Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams use accumulated progress data to audit whether current auxiliary aids, services, and accommodations are providing an equal opportunity to learn. If data reveals a downward trend or flatlining skills, the team is legally required to adjust the intensity of service delivery, modify accommodations, or introduce alternative specialized instruction.

Download the original published article

Additional Resources:
Evaluation Considerations
Determining Annual Yearly Progress
Tailoring Assessment Procedures to Meet the Needs of Students with Hearing Loss.
School Supports, Modifications, and Accommodations for Students with Hearing Loss.
Tests – Informal Assessment for Parents, Students, and Teachers
Progress Monitoring: What’s the Point?
Monitoring Progress of Skill-Building
Learning Progress Equal to Peers?
Understanding Student Assessment: Key Concepts and Considerations for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Learners

Originally published: March 2018
Last Updated: June 2026