District leaders want to know whether students are making progress, but national data doesn’t provide a clear picture. The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Report Card shows reading scores are down nationally in both fourth and eighth grades. Beyond that, the achievement gap between the highest and lowest performers is the widest it’s ever been.

But it’s not all bad news. The 2025 NAEP long-term trend assessment shows improved reading and math scores for 9-year-olds, while scores for 13-year-olds showed no significant change.

To understand what’s happening in your district, you need more than annual test scores. Tracking assessment results alongside attendance and behavior data can help you identify patterns, understand where students need support, and monitor whether interventions are working. Here’s how to bring those data sources together and use them to guide decisions about instruction and interventions.

[What data should districts track to monitor student progress?](id-measure)

To understand where students are succeeding and where they need additional support, your district needs progress monitoring beyond test scores. Regularly collecting assessment, attendance, and behavior data gives you a more complete picture of student progress and helps your teams make informed decisions about data-driven instruction.

Assessment data

Assessment data helps your district understand what students know during instruction and what they’ve learned over time. Formative and summative assessments provide different perspectives on student progress, and both have a place in a balanced assessment strategy.

While formative assessments provide frequent insights into student learning, summative assessments offer a broader view of achievement. Common assessments—whether formative or summative—also give teachers and district leaders consistent data to compare results across classrooms, collaborate on instructional strategies, and plan next steps. 

Together, these assessments create a balanced assessment strategy that helps your district monitor student progress throughout the school year. 

Attendance data

Students need to be present to learn. Research shows a connection between absenteeism and lower student achievement. New findings suggest that academic challenges may emerge even before students reach the 10% absence threshold used to define chronic absenteeism.

To understand student progress across your district, you need to know who’s regularly receiving instruction, who’s at risk of chronic absenteeism, and who’s missing valuable learning time. 

By identifying early absenteeism patterns, your team can intervene sooner and monitor whether attendance initiatives help students return to class.

Behavioral data

Student behavior is another important part of understanding progress across your district because it shows you how students show up in class. Looking at behavior data alongside academic performance and attendance can give your teams a more complete, whole-child view of students’ needs and the factors that may affect learning.

Analyzing behavioral data can help your district understand behavioral trends, identify areas for improvement, address inequities, and ensure all students get the support they need.

A complete picture of student progress

No single data source can tell the whole story. Once you identify your sources for assessment, attendance, and behavioral data, the next step is to gather that data in a secure place that provides holistic visibility into insights and trends. 

When you look at these measures together, patterns become easier to spot. A student with lower assessment scores and rising absences may need different support than a student with steady attendance and growing behavior referrals. Bringing the data together helps your district identify needs earlier, choose more targeted interventions, and monitor whether those interventions are working.

How the three data sources connect

Each source adds a different piece of the story. Together, they help districts understand student progress and make informed decisions about support.

Assessment
data

• Academic performance
• Growth over time

Attendance
data

• Access to instruction
• Absence patterns

Behavior
data

• Student support needs
• Learning context

A complete picture of student progress

• Identify patterns
• Target interventions
• Monitor impact

[How can districts use student progress data to support learning?](id-leverage)

To make informed decisions about student support, your district needs to collect, analyze, and act on reliable progress data. 

But when that information is scattered across spreadsheets, gradebooks, and multiple digital tools, identifying trends and responding to student needs becomes more difficult. 

Bringing your data together helps your team identify students who need additional support, evaluate intervention effectiveness, and adjust strategies as needs change. Here are three steps to use progress data to improve student outcomes:

Step 1: Collect student progress data in a secure platform

Tracking student progress data manually takes time and makes it harder to see the full picture. A secure, centralized student data platform helps your district organize assessment, attendance, and behavior data in one place. This makes it easier for teachers and administrators to access the information they need.

With a centralized data platform, your teams can view student progress across different timeframes, demographic groups, and other relevant factors. Plus, dashboards, charts, and graphs can help highlight concepts that need reinforcement, identify students who may need additional support, and communicate findings across your district.

Step 2: Analyze student progress and identify trends

As you collect more data points on student progress, your teams can analyze it to identify trends in academic performance, attendance, and behavior over time.l. For example, you can compare the data in different ways to understand how a specific subgroup of students is tracking towards standards mastery, or how building attendance trends compare. 

But districtwide averages don’t always tell the full story. Looking more closely at specific student- or subgroup-level data can reveal learning gaps, identify students who may need additional support, and help your teams monitor progress during interventions. These insights provide a stronger foundation for evaluating existing strategies and making informed decisions about next steps.

Step 3: Use progress data to guide MTSS interventions

Once your district identifies where students are making progress or need additional support, your teams can use the insights to inform learning goals, instructional strategies, attendance initiatives, and professional development opportunities. 

Progress monitoring also helps your teams evaluate those decisions over time. By reviewing new data as it becomes available, you can determine whether your strategies are addressing students' needs and where adjustments may be necessary.

Plan for differentiated instruction and interventions

Students progress at different paces, so it’s important to plan instruction and interventions around their individual needs. Progress monitoring helps teachers understand what support students need, deliver targeted interventions, and monitor how they respond. 

District leaders can use the same data to understand how students are responding to those supports across schools. As students make progress or their needs change, your teams can adjust instructional strategies and interventions to help keep them on track.

Track student progress with Schoolytics by EveryDay Labs

Tracking student progress is most useful when your district can connect what the data shows to the support students receive. To make informed decisions, your teams need a clear view of student needs, the interventions in place, and how students respond over time.

Schoolytics Connected MTSS brings assessment growth, intervention session data, and attendance information into one districtwide workflow. 

Instead of relying on separate school-level spreadsheets or fragmented reports, you can connect your student data directly to actionable next steps. Progress monitoring dashboards unify assessment growth, session dosage, and attendance context into one view so you can track and prove real student impact.