Ask the Experts

There is definitely merit in using some of the same instruments for screening and progress monitoring. However, it is likely some of the measures will ultimately differ because schools will need more detailed measures than CBM to identify students. The problem with using the same CBM progress monitoring assessments for screens is they are not by themselves very accurate screens. In the long run, RTI screening is likely to use a multiple-gating procedure for screening where:

1. First, a simple (maybe CBM) universal screen is used to identify students potentially at risk.
2. Second, students scoring around some cut-point receive further, in depth, testing to help distinguish between those who without intervention are likely to fail (true positives) from those who will succeed without intervention (false positives).

Another consideration is whether schools use a Direct Route or a Progress Monitoring Route model of identifying students for Tier 2. The way that schools identify students for Tier 2 intervention varies according to the type of RTI model that is implemented. In Direct Route Models students identified as at-risk by a screening process are immediately provided Tier 2 intervention (e.g., Jenkins, Hudson, & Johnson, 2007; Vellutino et al., 1996; Vellutino, Scanlon, Zhang, & Schatschneider, in press). By contrast, in Progress Monitoring, or PM Route Models, universal screening identifies potentially at-risk students whose progress is then monitored for several weeks. Whether these students enter Tier 2 depends on the level of their performance and rate of growth on PM measures (Compton, Fuchs, & Fuchs, 2007). The PM Route yields marginally better identification accuracy than the Direct Route, but it also postpones intervention during the PM phase. By contrast, the Direct Route leads to earlier intervention, but without PM to catch screening errors more students are mistakenly identified as at-risk. In both models screening may be a singular event or conducted periodically (e.g., fall, winter, spring).