Bridges4Kids website IEP Goals– scroll down past the yellow banner to find many links to sites with useful information on developing goals and objectives

Topic headlines in Wrightslaw IEP newsletter

• Can the IEP Team Prepare a "Draft IEP" Before an IEP Meeting?
• Guidance from the Commentary to the IDEA 2004 Regulations
• Commentary: Draft IEPs

 Questions to think about prior to the IEP meeting:

• What was the child expected to learn or achieve?
• How well was the child expected to achieve the goal?
• How often was the child expected to achieve the goal?
• What data would be kept as to #2 and #3 above, and how often would the data be kept?
• How often would the goal be worked on?
• Which staff members were responsible for working on the goal and collecting the data?

IEP Goals should be: 

1. Specific as possible
2. Objective
3. Measurable

How will I know my child is making progress?

The IEP should specify:

• what data will be collected
• how often the data will be collected

OSEP has also dictated how progress should be monitored by local school systems.  Read:

Progress Monitoring in an Inclusive Standards-based Assessment and Accountability System

An excerpt from the above:

We discuss the benefits and uses of progress monitoring methods and formative data sources in four general categories: (1) Curriculum-Based Measurement; (2) Classroom assessments (system or teacher-developed); (3) Adaptive assessments; and (4) Large-scale assessments used during the year to monitor growth of individual students and groups of students. We conclude the paper with several recommendations for practice:…

This report describes how progress monitoring—a set of techniques for assessing student performance on a regular and frequent basis—can be an essential and integral part of an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system. The nation’s current emphasis on a standards-based educational system defines success in terms of all children achieving grade-level proficiency. This is a very different context from that in which progress monitoring has been used in the past, where progress was measured against individual starting points, and not to an external criterion. For students with disabilities, the child was expected to make "reasonable" progress defined by the Individualized Educational Program (IEP), which reflected how much progress the school, parent, and student were willing to accept. The emphasis on external criteria of grade-level content and achievement standards in an inclusive standards-based assessment and accountability system has raised the bar of what "reasonable" student progress is. Schools are held accountable for these higher expectations regardless of past practices.