What is a learning progression?

A learning progression is a sequenced map of the knowledge, skills, and understandings students develop over time as they move toward mastery of a big idea or standard. It describes intermediate steps between a novice starting point and the expected endpoint, giving teachers a shared framework for instruction and assessment.

How are learning progressions different from a scope and sequence?

A scope and sequence lists what will be taught and when across a curriculum. A learning progression goes deeper by describing how understanding develops, the specific conceptual and procedural milestones students move through, including common partial understandings and misconceptions along the way. Scope and sequence is a calendar; a learning progression is a developmental map.

Who develops learning progressions?

Learning progressions can be developed by curriculum specialists, district teams, or classroom teachers working collaboratively. Some are embedded in published curricula or state standards frameworks. Research-based progressions often draw on cognitive science studies of how learners in a domain actually develop understanding, not just how adults logically sequence content.

How do learning progressions connect to formative assessment?

Learning progressions give formative assessment its diagnostic power. When teachers know the expected intermediate steps in a progression, they can design assessments that reveal exactly where a student sits on the continuum, not just whether they are right or wrong, but which step they have reached and what misconception they may be holding. Without a progression, formative data is hard to act on.

Can learning progressions be used across grade levels?

Yes, and that vertical span is one of their primary strengths. Progressions often stretch across multiple grade bands, showing how foundational ideas in early grades scaffold toward disciplinary expertise later. This vertical view helps teachers understand where their students are coming from and where they are heading, making cross-grade collaboration and curriculum mapping much more coherent.

Learning Progressions — Teaching Wiki

Definition

A learning progression is a research- or evidence-informed sequence that describes how students' understanding of a concept or skill develops from a starting point toward sophisticated, expert-level mastery. Rather than treating knowledge as a checklist of discrete facts to be delivered, a learning progression maps the route — the intermediate understandings, partial conceptions, and stepping-stone skills that characterize genuine conceptual growth.

The defining feature of a learning progression is its developmental specificity. It does not merely say that students should "understand fractions" by fourth grade. It describes what naïve fraction understanding looks like, what a student who grasps part-whole relationships but struggles with fractions greater than one looks like, and what a student who can reason flexibly with fractions on a number line looks like. Each level is defined by its own logic, not just by proximity to the endpoint.

Learning progressions operate at multiple scales. A macro-progression might span kindergarten through high school, tracing how mathematical reasoning or scientific modeling develops over twelve years. A micro-progression might span a single unit of instruction, mapping the conceptual moves students make over three weeks. Both serve the same fundamental function: they give teachers a shared, evidence-grounded picture of how students grow, and they give students a transparent path forward.

Historical Context

The formal concept of learning progressions emerged from cognitive science and science education research in the late twentieth century, though its intellectual roots reach back further. Jean Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development, published through the 1950s and 1960s, introduced the idea that learning unfolds through qualitatively distinct phases rather than linear accumulation. Piaget's stages were biological and largely fixed; later researchers showed that domain-specific progressions could be shaped by instruction.

The term "learning progressions" gained traction in science education following the National Research Council's 2007 report Taking Science to School, which argued that curriculum and assessment in the United States needed to be organized around explicit descriptions of how scientific understanding develops across grade bands. The NRC's work drew heavily on researchers like Karen Hammerness, Richard Lehrer, and Leona Schauble, who had spent decades studying how children's reasoning in specific domains actually develops — often in ways that surprised curriculum designers trained in logical sequencing rather than cognitive sequencing.

In mathematics education, the development of the Common Core State Standards (2010) was accompanied by a parallel effort to write explicit learning progressions documents, "progressions" papers authored by the standards writers, including William McCallum and Jason Zimba, that traced the mathematical development behind each domain. These documents, distributed freely through the University of Arizona's Institute for Mathematics and Education, became widely used by curriculum developers and coaches.

Simultaneously, the formative assessment movement, advanced by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's landmark 1998 meta-analysis Inside the Black Box, made clear that diagnostic teaching required more than knowing the endpoint standard. Teachers needed to know the path. Learning progressions provided that path, and the two bodies of work became increasingly intertwined through the 2000s and 2010s.

Key Principles

Progressions describe development, not just difficulty

A well-constructed learning progression does not simply arrange content from easy to hard. It describes qualitatively different ways of understanding. A student who counts by ones to solve an addition problem is not doing "easier math" than a student who decomposes numbers to add; they are operating from a different conceptual model. The progression must capture that difference. This is what distinguishes a genuine learning progression from a pacing guide.

Intermediate steps are defined by their own logic

Each level in a progression has coherence. Students at a given level are not simply missing information; they hold a particular set of understandings and limitations that are internally consistent. A student who believes that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones is not randomly wrong — that understanding is predictable, based on prior experience with collisions and weight. Good progressions name these intermediate conceptions explicitly, because teachers cannot address what they cannot see.

Progressions are anchored at both ends

Every progression needs a clearly described starting point and a clearly described endpoint. The starting point is not "zero knowledge", students arrive with significant prior experience and intuition in any domain. The endpoint is usually defined by grade-level standards, college-readiness benchmarks, or disciplinary expertise. Without anchors at both ends, a progression drifts into vague developmental language that cannot guide instructional decisions.

Progressions are empirical, not purely logical

The sequence in which concepts are taught should reflect the sequence in which understanding actually develops, not just the sequence that seems logical to an expert. Research in cognition consistently shows that logical sequencing and developmental sequencing often diverge. Fractions as division, for instance, is logically prior to fraction division, but cognitively it often develops later. Progressions must be tested against what students actually do, not just what curriculum designers expect them to do.

Progressions support both instruction and assessment

A learning progression is not an assessment rubric, but it functions as the backbone of one. It tells teachers what evidence to gather and how to interpret it. A student response that seems "wrong" may place clearly on a progression as a well-documented intermediate understanding, which changes the instructional response entirely. This dual function, guiding both what to teach and how to assess progress, is what gives progressions their leverage in the classroom.

Classroom Application

Elementary mathematics: number sense and place value

A second-grade teacher using a learning progression for place value will know that students typically move through a sequence from counting by ones, to grouping in tens, to understanding that a digit's position determines its value, to flexibly composing and decomposing multi-digit numbers. Rather than presenting all of these ideas simultaneously, she sequences instruction to build from students' current location on the map. When a student writes "100 + 30 + 2" correctly but then adds 132 + 245 by counting on from 132, the progression tells her exactly what that student understands and what comes next. She responds with a targeted activity on regrouping, not a re-teach of the whole unit.

Middle school science: the particulate nature of matter

A middle school science teacher working with a progression on matter will recognize that students commonly hold the misconception that matter is continuous rather than particulate well into eighth grade. The progression helps him design a sequence of investigations that creates cognitive conflict with that prior conception before introducing atomic models. He does not start with the periodic table; he starts with phenomena that cannot be explained without invoking particles. The progression keeps him from skipping ahead to formal notation before students have a functional model to attach it to.

High school writing: argument and evidence

An eleventh-grade English teacher using a learning progression for argumentative writing tracks students from "claim with personal opinion" through "claim with supporting examples" to "claim with evidence, warrants, and acknowledgment of counterargument." A student whose essay asserts a position and then lists reasons without connecting them to a warrant is not simply bad at writing — she is at a predictable intermediate step. The teacher's feedback and the next mini-lesson target that specific gap, not writing in general. This progression-informed feedback is more actionable for students and more efficient for teachers than holistic scoring alone.

Research Evidence

Margaret Heritage's 2008 report Learning Progressions: Supporting Instruction and Formative Assessment, published by the Council of Chief State School Officers, synthesized the available research and established the field's core claims. Heritage argued that progressions give formative assessment its diagnostic specificity — without a progression, teachers know that students are stuck but not where or why. Schools that used explicit progressions alongside formative assessment protocols showed more targeted instructional responses than those using formative assessment without progressions.

A major research program at the University of Wisconsin led by Mark Wilson and colleagues developed the "construct modeling" approach, which builds learning progressions from empirical studies of student work rather than expert intuition. Wilson's 2005 book Constructing Measures presented the psychometric case for progression-based assessment, and subsequent studies demonstrated that assessments built on validated progressions produced more actionable diagnostic information than traditional summative tests.

In science education, the work of Lorrie Shepard and colleagues, including the 2005 study "Linking Formative Assessment to Scaffolding" published in Educational Leadership, showed that teachers who could articulate where students were on a developmental progression gave more specific and effective feedback than teachers relying on general curriculum goals. Effect sizes on student learning in these studies ranged from 0.4 to 0.7, comparable to other high-leverage instructional practices.

The research also identifies real limitations. Progressions are difficult and expensive to build well. Many commercially available progressions are based on logical sequencing rather than empirical research on student thinking, and some are poorly validated. A 2011 review by Duschl, Maeng, and Sezen in Studies in Science Education found wide variation in the quality and empirical grounding of published progressions, cautioning educators to examine the evidence base behind any progression they adopt rather than treating all progressions as equally reliable.

Common Misconceptions

Misconception: A learning progression is the same as a standards document. Standards describe what students should know and be able to do at a given grade level. A learning progression describes how understanding develops across levels and over time. Standards are endpoints; progressions are pathways. A state standard might say "students will understand the relationship between multiplication and division" — a progression describes the sequence of understandings that leads there, including the specific ways students typically misunderstand that relationship. The two documents serve different functions and neither substitutes for the other.

Misconception: Progressions are linear, students move through steps in fixed order. Well-designed progressions describe common developmental sequences, not rigid lockstep paths. Students do not all move through the same steps at the same pace, and some students skip steps entirely while others return to earlier levels under new conditions of complexity. A progression is a probabilistic map of how understanding typically develops, not a guarantee that any individual student will follow the charted route. Teachers use progressions as diagnostic tools, not as scripts.

Misconception: Using a progression means teaching to the lowest level. Some teachers worry that organizing instruction around a developmental map means slowing down advanced students or capping expectations. The opposite is true. A progression-informed teacher can identify quickly which students have already moved past a given milestone and offer tasks at the next level, while simultaneously supporting students who need to consolidate an earlier step. Progressions enable differentiation at the level of conceptual understanding, not just task quantity. They raise the ceiling as much as they support the floor.

Connection to Active Learning

Learning progressions are most powerful when paired with active learning methods that surface student thinking. A progression identifies the intermediate steps in understanding; active learning creates the conditions where students must externalize and examine their current thinking, making their position on the progression visible.

Formative assessment is the natural partner. When teachers use exit tickets, cold calls, whiteboards, or think-alouds, they generate real-time evidence about where students sit on the progression. Without the progression, that evidence is hard to interpret; with it, a single student response can instantly signal what comes next instructionally.

Curriculum mapping benefits from progressions at a structural level. When a school or department maps its curriculum vertically, learning progressions provide the conceptual spine — the description of how understanding grows across years, not just which standards appear in which grade. Mapping without a progression can produce coverage without coherence, where students encounter the same topic repeatedly without deepening their understanding.

Standards-based grading becomes meaningfully diagnostic when it is organized around learning progressions. Reporting a student's proficiency level on a progression-based scale communicates far more than a percentage score. It tells students, families, and teachers exactly what understanding has been demonstrated and what the next step looks like. The combination of explicit progressions with standards-based reporting is one of the strongest tools available for making student growth transparent and actionable.

Inquiry-based and project-based approaches also benefit. When teachers design projects around the next conceptual step in a progression, they can build authentic tasks that require the specific move forward. A project that asks students to argue from evidence, for instance, targets a particular step in the argumentative writing progression; the teacher knows in advance what threshold evidence to look for, and students understand what they are working toward.

Sources

National Research Council. (2007). Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K–8. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
Heritage, M. (2008). Learning Progressions: Supporting Instruction and Formative Assessment. Washington, DC: Council of Chief State School Officers.
Wilson, M. (2005). Constructing Measures: An Item Response Modeling Approach. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Duschl, R., Maeng, S., & Sezen, A. (2011). Learning progressions and teaching sequences: A review and analysis. Studies in Science Education, 47(2), 123–182.

Learning Progressions