The K-12 marketplace has no shortage of "progress monitoring" products.  These products typically offer an item or test bank that is said to be aligned with state standards.  Students are then assessed with these tests and a series of canned reports are produced illustrating basic student results.  While this functionality has value, it only addresses a fraction of what is required for true progress monitoring.

Performance Matters™ integrates a broad range of "lagging and leading indicators".   Historical data (data from previous years) are referred to as lagging indicators.  For example, high stakes test scores are lagging data that are an integral part of evaluating an individual student, teacher or school's success.  Performance Matters™ integrates the complexities of each State's accountability system with the high stakes test scores so that you can easily evaluate the performance against state standards at any level; student, subgroup, school, district and so on.

Leading indicators include a host of data that is accumulated during the course of the current school year.  Performance Matters™ has integrated a broad portfolio of reports for many different assessment instruments including benchmark assessments, SAT and PSAT, ACT, PLAN and Explore, DIBELS, DAR, NWEA/MAP-R, ITBS, Stan10 and other assessments which are specific to States.  

By combining lagging and leading indicators, Performance Matters is uniquely capable of offering a comprehensive, integrated view of performance.  The lagging and leading indicator model is prescriptive:

In medicine a Dr.'s prescription is based upon an evaluation of the patient's history (lagging information) and their current symptoms (leading information).  Similarly, with Performance Matters™, teachers and administrators can evaluate a student's historical information and all of their current performance indicators to prescribe the appropriate instructional strategy. 

Without this complete picture, teachers and administrators will inevitably make the wrong diagnosis based upon incomplete information and as a result implement an ineffective strategy to address the student(s) needs.