In 2013, staff at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Centre for Global Education Monitoring (GEM) identified the need to build measurement tools to monitor learning growth that could be used across different year levels and in different national contexts. One of those projects, under ACER's Monitoring Trends in Educational Growth program, involved the development of an assessment program in Afghanistan at the Grade 6 level, which is now being extended to Grade 3, and later possibly to Grade 9. At the same time, the Learning Metrics Task Force led by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution was progressing rapidly in its work to develop a framework that identifies education's central place in post-2015 global development goals as well as the tools that would be needed to monitor progress against those goals, particularly in developing countries. GEM researchers presented an approach to measuring learning progress, based on similar work over many years and in many different contexts, to a meeting of literacy experts at the UIS in Montréal in March, 2014. With encouragement from the UIS, GEM researchers have since then been working to develop learning metrics to quantify and describe growth in reading comprehension and in mathematical proficiency for students from early primary school level through to middle secondary school level. The aim of ACER's GEM research to develop new learning metrics that monitor learning progress is to help educators and education policy makers to identify learning goals appropriate to particular students. Educators can then identify the appropriate next steps to take and which resources to provide, in order to support those students in their learning progress.