The Academic Screening Tools Chart was developed to assist educators and families in becoming informed consumers who can select academic screening tools that best meet their individual needs. The Center's Technical Review Committee (TRC) on Screening independently established a set of criteria for evaluating the scientific rigor of screening tools. The TRC rated each submitted tool against these criteria but did not compare it to other tools on the chart.
In this video developed for the Illinois Center for School Improvement, Dr. Rebecca Zumeta Edmonds discusses how screening tools can provide a more accurate measure of at-risk students within the context of a multi-tiered system of supports.
Successful implementation of a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) and, specifically, intensive intervention through the data-based individualization (DBI) process, demands the collection and analysis of data. As teams consider data collection, challenges may occur with assessment administration, scoring, and data entry (Taylor, 2009). This resource reviews three data collection and entry challenges and strategies to ensure data about risk status and responsiveness accurately represent student performance and minimize measurement errors.
A main goal of multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) is to identify and intervene early with students who are struggling. But how do we know if a struggling student really needs intervention? If you have experience teaching very young children, you know that difficulties mastering foundational skills like decoding and number sense are typical.