Ask the Experts

The purpose of screening is to quickly identify those students who might be at risk for poor academic or behavioral outcomes. Medical screening provides a useful and easily understood analogy—vision screenings quickly identify people who need further diagnostic assessment to correct their vision; blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate are routinely screened because they provide an indication of overall well-being that helps inform a doctor's decision to test further. These screens are very brief and easy to administer, and they give medical professionals a lot of information about what to do next for a patient. Similarly, academic and behavior screens should be brief, easy to administer and easy to score. They should also be accurate—that is, the screening process should reliably sort students as either being at-risk or not at-risk for the outcome of interest, and inform what should happen next for a student. It will be a local—or perhaps a state—decision to determine the cost-benefit of employing different screening instruments; LEAs and SEAs should consider time and cost to administer as a function of the quality of information received.

It is recommended to conduct screening three times per year for the following reasons: 1) the demands of the curriculum can increase as the school year progresses, winter and spring screenings can catch students who have up to that point been able to make adequate progress; 2) screening benchmarks at various points during the year inform not only individual decisions, but also provide class/school level data that can inform instructional practice; and 3) students may transfer in and out of school and screening at multiple points can ensure that these students do not have to wait too long to receive services if needed.