The Individualized Education Program is often called the cornerstone of special education — the document that translates a student’s rights into a concrete plan for learning. And within the IEP, the annual goal is where intention becomes action. A well-written goal names exactly what a student will be able to do, under what conditions, to what degree, and by when. A vague one leaves everyone guessing.
Yet for decades, a surprising gap sat at the center of the field: very little rigorous research had actually examined the relationship between the quality of an IEP and student learning. Educators knew good goals mattered. They just didn’t have the evidence — or the tools — to reliably produce them, or to prove the difference they made. Over the past ten years, a series of studies conducted with Goalbook’s research partners has begun to close that gap. Read together, they tell a coherent story: better tools produce better goals, better goals trace back to better present levels, and higher-quality IEP practice is associated with real gains for students.
Where it began: San Francisco State University, 2014
The first rigorous look came from San Francisco State University. Dr. Susan J. Courey, a professor of special education, and faculty member Dr. Phyllis M. Tappe set out to help their student teachers write more personalized, standards-aligned learning goals at a moment when Common Core had just raised the bar for what special educators were expected to do.
They built a research-based rubric that scored each IEP goal on ten essential components — whether it was grounded in the student’s present level of performance, illustrated what the student would be able to do, specified the level and conditions of performance, set a time frame for mastery, measured progress, aligned to standards, and was adapted to the individual student, among others — for a total of 20 possible points. Then they scored the goals their student teachers wrote both with and without Goalbook Toolkit as a resource.
The difference was not subtle. Goals written with Goalbook averaged 17.5 out of 20, compared with 5.0 for goals written without it — two and a half times more information for planning and measuring a student’s success. Put another way, goals written with Goalbook included 88% of the essential quality components, versus just 25% without. The IEPs were more complete in virtually every aspect.
“We thought Goalbook would have a positive effect, but the results were phenomenal,” Tappe said at the time. “Providing teachers with supports that suggest ideas for dealing with ability gaps helped our student teachers to significantly improve their ability to differentiate instruction for all students.”
As Courey put it, “A clearly defined IEP is so important to students with special needs, and actionable goals are a vital part of that plan.” The SFSU study — a small, early case study — didn’t measure student test scores. What it established was foundational and, at the time, novel: given the right scaffold, teachers write dramatically better goals. It is the origin of the “2.5× more information” finding that Goalbook’s research has returned to ever since.
Why goal quality isn’t just paperwork
It would be easy to read the SFSU result as a story about better documentation. It’s really a story about better instruction. An IEP goal is the blueprint a teacher works from all year; if the blueprint is vague, so is the teaching. And the goal itself rests on something upstream — the present level of academic achievement and functional performance, or PLAAFP, the honest picture of where a student is and what’s getting in the way. A goal can only be as clear as the present level it’s built on.
That insight is exactly what the next wave of research set out to test.
Present levels drive quality — and growth: University of Missouri, 2021
In 2021, a University of Missouri team led by Dr. Erica Lembke and Dr. Matthew K. Burns studied 211 special educators and their students in the Special School District of St. Louis County — a district that had been using Goalbook to strengthen IEP quality since 2014. They scored the quality of each teacher’s present-level statements and connected both Goalbook usage and present-level quality to student growth in reading and math.
The findings extended the SFSU story from documents to outcomes. Present-levels quality was a statistically significant predictor of student achievement in both reading and math. Educators who used Goalbook more wrote higher-quality present levels — high-usage teachers produced high-quality present levels 20% more often than minimal-usage peers. And the student-growth pattern was striking: students of teachers in the highest Goalbook usage tier grew 3.4 times more in reading and 5.64 times more in math than students of minimal-usage teachers. Even above-average usage was associated with 1.5 times more reading growth than minimal use.
As one district coach reflected, the present-levels statement is “the heart of the IEP” — and here, for the first time, was data connecting the strength of that statement to measurable student progress.
The golden thread: University of Missouri, 2025
The most recent study in this line, again from the University of Missouri and the same St. Louis County district, named the mechanism directly. Researchers scored 236 IEP goals alongside their matching present-level statements and found a strong relationship between the two: present-levels quality and goal quality were correlated at r = .63, meaning the quality of a student’s present levels explained roughly 40% of the variation in the quality of their goals.
This is the “golden thread” of a coherent IEP — present level, to goal, to instruction — made visible in the data. It confirms what the SFSU rubric implied a decade earlier: the single most defensible lever for a better goal is a better present level. And it reframes what Goalbook does. Rather than simply generating goals, the Toolkit acts as an “effort multiplier,” giving educators a structured way to synthesize data into a clear present level and carry that clarity through to aligned, high-quality goals — without starting from a blank page.
From quality IEPs to student literacy
Does any of this reach students at scale? The largest study in the portfolio suggests it does. In a 2022 quasi-experimental study meeting the ESSA Tier 2 (Moderate Evidence) standard, researchers at the SERVE Center at UNC-Greensboro examined more than 58,000 North Carolina special education students. Those in schools where educators had access to Goalbook Toolkit scored statistically significantly higher in reading than matched comparison students — an effect that held across every student subgroup examined, by gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, and that grew larger in the second year of implementation.
The through-line is complete: give educators a tool that scaffolds high-quality present levels and goals (SFSU, 2014), and their IEP practice measurably improves; connect that quality to students, and you see growth (Missouri, 2021 and 2025); scale it across a state, and reading achievement rises for students with disabilities (North Carolina, 2022).
And in 2025, the field agrees — at scale
For most of this story, the evidence comes from research partners studying goals, present levels, and outcomes. The most recent data point comes from the practitioners themselves. In 2025, Goalbook surveyed 4,526 special educators and, for the first time, 227 special education leaders — and their answers confirm at scale what the SFSU rubric first measured with a handful of student teachers. 97% of educators now agree Goalbook helps them write standards-aligned, measurable IEP goals, and 99% of leaders agree it supports developing high-quality IEPs. On coherence specifically — the present-levels-to-goal connection at the heart of this story — 98% of leaders say Goalbook produces more coherent IEPs and 95% of educators say it helps them write present-levels statements that clearly articulate student needs.
A decade after a small case study found that a scaffold produces dramatically better goals, thousands of the educators and leaders doing the work report the same thing about their daily practice. The rubric score has become a professional consensus. (These 2025 figures come from an internal Goalbook survey analysis, not an externally validated study.)
What this means for educators and leaders
Three implications stand out for anyone responsible for IEP quality.
First, treat present-levels writing as a diagnostic skill, not a clerical one. Because so much of goal quality — and, downstream, student growth — traces back to the present level, that’s where professional learning should concentrate. Teach educators to synthesize assessment data into a precise picture of a student’s strengths and breakdowns.
Second, introduce these supports early. The SFSU study worked with student teachers still forming their practice. Building strong habits during teacher preparation and induction — with a scaffold like Goalbook — makes a complete, standards-aligned, measurable goal the norm rather than the exception.
Third, pair the tool with the practice. Across these studies, Goalbook’s impact grows when it’s embedded in real workflows and professional learning rather than handed over as a standalone resource. The tool provides the what; coaching and collaboration provide the how.
A decade of research, across teacher-preparation programs, a Missouri school district, and a statewide sample, points in the same direction. It starts with the goal — and the present level beneath it. When educators are equipped to get those right, the whole plan gets stronger, and students are the ones who benefit.
