The Issue
Screening assessments are designed to quickly provide important information about what supports students may need to reach their full potential. Screening routinely happens throughout our lives, like having blood pressure or temperature checked in a medical visit.
In school screening, the focus is on catching student concerns early, which means schools can intervene early to keep those concerns from becoming more intense.
In recent years, it has been exciting to witness the addition of many new school-based screening options. The promise of school screening, however, has not been fully realized for several reasons:
- Screeners often have a narrow focus, meaning multiple different assessments might be needed to gather all of the information that is important across whole child domains.
- Screeners often have a deficit focus, meaning problems are located as within the child and therefore may overlook contextual factors that can affect success (e.g. school experiences, economic stability).
- School-based screening practices can be hindered by barriers such as resource demands and limited capacity for data use, meaning attention is needed to build efficient screeners along with effective guides for interpretation and use.
- Screener potential in achieving goals to proactively identify and remediate is not well understood, meaning work is needed to understand resulting intended and unintended consequences.
In summary, screening offers tremendous potential to inform school decisions about supports that help students reach their full potential. Yet developers of school-based screeners need to attend to the above challenges, and engage processes that (1) balance efficiency and comprehensiveness, (2) center usability (satisfaction, ease of use, effective toward attaining goals), and, (3) evaluate consequential validity.
Our Approach
Our process to developing the ESSY Whole Child Screener involves a mixed methods approach that adds to traditional assessment development steps. This integrated approach centers attention to consequential validity throughout development and validation, meaning purposeful investigation of intended and unintended consequences from use of the screener and resulting data. This means that multiple opportunities to revise the measure and associated guidance regarding use are provided throughout the development and validation phases.
More Information
The Collaboratory on School and Child Health recently published a Q&A with Co-Principal Investigator Jacqueline Caemmerer. Read the project profile.