Hi Michelle,
Thank you for this important question; it’s timely too, as many districts will be administering a universal screener in January. I think part of what is feeding your frustration is a confusion between these different types of measures and their intended purposes.
Universal literacy screeners are designed to be brief, relatively infrequent measures that identify students who may be at risk for reading difficulties. Like other medical or educational screeners, they are not sufficient for definitively identifying the nature of a student’s difficulty without further evaluation, but instead flag students who may need further testing or may benefit from additional support. Universal screening can help prevent students from “falling through the cracks” by allowing schools to provide timely intervention when necessary, without needlessly sacrificing precious instructional time with lengthy diagnostic assessments for every student.
However, the purpose of their design begins and ends there: screeners are relatively short measures intended to demonstrate appropriate sensitivity in identifying at-risk students, without over-identifying students who do not need additional support (often referred to as specificity). Because of this design, screening measures are likely to include components such as rapid automatized naming (RAN), which are useful for identifying students at risk, but do not directly translate to instructional practices in the classroom. So, these screeners will point out students who likely need additional support, but they may not give you specific enough information to tell you exactly what skills should be targeted.
In contrast, progress-monitoring measures are designed to be used frequently with students, especially those who are receiving any additional instruction or intervention. The purpose of these measures is to detect small, incremental changes in performance over time so teachers can evaluate whether instruction and/or intervention are effective, and make timely adjustments when needed. Some progress-monitoring measures are purchased through publishing companies, while informal tools that educators create to track specific target areas (such as tracking oral reading fluency or counting how many letter-sound correspondences a student can provide) would also fall under this bucket.
Because progress monitoring is intended to guide instructional decision-making, these measures typically focus on skills that are directly taught and are sensitive to short-term growth, such as accuracy or automaticity with specific reading skills. When used appropriately, progress-monitoring data provide the kind of week-to-week information that helps teachers determine whether to continue, intensify, or adjust instruction for individual students. They don’t, however, always give a clear picture of which students are at-risk for continued or future difficulties. For example, a progress monitoring tool might show a Kindergarten teacher how her students are performing with a phoneme isolation task. But it doesn’t necessarily show her a cutoff point of when she should flag a student for additional support, and when a student’s skills are just a natural variation in student performance at that age. Moreover, the progress monitoring measure shows her how quickly students are picking up on skills taught in the classroom; it doesn’t tell her whether or not the task is an important predictor of future reading skills (the role of a screener).
What may add to the confusion is that some companies offer both universal screeners and progress-monitoring measures, while others offer only one. While it may seem convenient to purchase both tools from the same company, this does not automatically make them the best fit. The strongest universal screeners are those with solid psychometric evidence (meaning they consistently and accurately identify students who may be at risk for reading difficulties). There are several important psychometric properties to consider when selecting a screener, but that’s beyond the scope of this article, unfortunately!
To be perfectly clear, universal screeners are not designed to replace progress-monitoring measures, and your frustration is completely warranted if your district expects you to use them as such.
Your instinct to want more frequent, instructionally useful data is a sound one. Universal screeners are not designed to provide that level of detail, which is why progress-monitoring measures remain essential for students, especially those receiving additional support. If your current system does not allow for both, that is a conversation worth having at the school or district level. I will, however, also always be an advocate for universal screeners! Early identification and intervention is imperative for struggling readers. Hopefully you (and your district) see the importance of implementing both of these measures in your system.
