STEEP-Screening to Enhance Educational Performance^© 

This is one of a small number of evidenced based RTI programs for improving services to all children and reducing the need for special education and other special services.  This page describes the STEEP process.  Additional information can be found at the official STEEP site:  www.isteep.com. 

The process utilizes universal screening of all children for early identification of children who are at risk.  No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and several national panels recommend this practice for all children.  Children who are at-risk during screening, are considered for classwide, small group, or individual intervention.   Progress monitoring is used to determine if the intervention is meeting the child's needs.  The process provides for integrated services between general and special education because, children who do not respond to intervention may be considered further for special education eligibility.  The model is consistent with a response to intervention (or resistance to intervention) model and is used within many districts as a problem-solving model.  An overview of the model, with particular attention to relevance for special education follows. 

How STEEP Helps General Educators

Benefits to the Teacher

Teachers can make good use of information about students in their classroom. STEEP offers the following benefits to teachers:

1. Faster service.  By screening all children, schools can identify early which children need help.    
2. Help for referred children and those at risk. Often within the special education model, the decision is only to classify or not classify the child as needing special education. With STEEP teachers are offered assistance for the child. Also, the type of problem a child has is identified (i.e., can’t do vs. won’t do) and the assistance provided is linked to the child's problem. In addition, teachers get step by step instructions and materials for intervening with a child
3. Information for instructional planning. From the screening, teachers will learn how every child in the class if performing. They can use this information to plan instruction. For some districts this has become part of the general education process for assisting schools to identify at-risk learners and prevent problems before they occur.
 

Benefits to the Principal and School-Based Team

1. Efficiency and effectiveness of school team meeting is enhanced. STEEP provides a systematic process for assisting the school to improve achievement for all children.   Team meetings are more productive and produce improved outcomes for children considered.
2. Interventions are provided to the school for use in problem-solving. These interventions are available to help the team assist teachers without referral to special education.
3. Options for assisting at-risk children can be coordinated. STEEP provides a systematic way to address concerns brought to the school-based team. Within that framework, schools can allocate resources to assist in areas of greatest need.
4. Helps with state mandated test scores. STEEP assessments correlate with state test scores. Screening in September provides a good indication of which children are likely to have poor performance on high stakes test scores.  This provides an early warning system for children who are likely to perform poorly on those tests. At risk children can be placed on the radar screen and receive targeted intervention to improve achievement.

How STEEP benefits special educators.

STEEP incorporates specific “tests” to rule out factors such as motivation and  disadvantage.   The process, which represents a collection of research validated practices, when used, has shown a decrease in referral rates of approximately 33% for all children and a decrease in referral of minority children by up to 50%. Referrals, which do go through the STEEP process, are more likely to be “valid” referrals because they are based upon more than solely the report of the teacher. Nationally, the typical team meeting with in a school is almost solely dependent on the report of the referring teacher for “data” concerning the severity of the problem. 

Within the STEEP process, to be referred, a child must pass through a series of “gates” that serve to rule out children who may be low-performing or low-achieving but who do not have a disability. The gates are time efficient and the process can usually be completed within one hour, representing a marked decrease in assessment time and resources compared to a full evaluation. The process is considered to be a screening process to determine if a full evaluation is actually needed.  The model consists of the following components or gates.

The STEEP process was originally called Problem Validation Screening and later Screening to Enhance Equitable Placement.  Because of its broad use and benefits to general education, the name was changed to Screening to Enhance Educational Performance. 

Classwide Assessment

At the first “gate” the possibility of cultural or educational disadvantage is examined. Here the referred child and all children in the classroom of the referred child are given timed probes in reading and math. These are short, timed (i.e., 1-2 minutes for each academic area) exercises pertaining to current classroom curriculum objectives.  For a child to move through this gate, the child would need to score at or very near the bottom of the class in one or more academic areas and also be significantly below national standards for the grade.  Frequently, in low performing schools, it is learned that the referred child is low-achieving but so are many other children in the class. If something is affecting many children in a classroom, then the possibility of educational or cultural disadvantage has to be considered. In this case, many students are performing similarly and all students appear to need additional assistance. In high performing schools, the child may be the lowest student compared to the class but would not be considered a problem when compared to the national gold standard. VanDerHeyden  (2001) found that classroom context significantly and negatively impacted the accuracy of teacher referral. That is, teachers became much less accurate at identifying students who did and did not have a problem in both low-achieving and high-achieving classrooms, whereas STEEP maintained or achieved even greater accuracy across contexts.   

Web based data management is designed to make it easy for teachers and others to make important decisions about students.

Can’t Do/Won’t Do Assessment

For children who have a potentially valid disability after gate one, they are given, a “can’t/won’t do” assessment at the second gate. This assessment consists of repeating each of the probes used in the classroom but this time the child is offered an incentive to improve his or her score. If the child’s performance improves markedly, then the child is hypothesized to exhibit a motivation problem in the classroom, not a disability.  Hence, this step is a “rule out” for motivation as a contributing factor. 

Intervention

Children who appear to have a problem at Gates one and two are presented with a brief intervention at Gate 3. This intervention is similar to other so-called pre-referral interventions with two exceptions. First, the intervention is used for assessment. The assessment question is, can this child learn if given high quality instruction. The second difference is that since it is used for assessment purposes, it is more intensive than some pre-referral interventions. It is designed to be used only for a few days, not permanently. If the child learns rapidly, then the intervention is modified to make it easier to be used within the classroom context. The purpose of this gate is to test the possibility that the child can learn, but simply has not been taught effectively (i.e., to rule out lack of instruction as a cause).   Interventions used in this phase are typically computer based (or specially constructed teacher delivered interventions) to facilitate measurement of intervention fidelity.

Progress Monitoring

Once students begin intervention, student tracking and progress monitoring is initiated.  This involves brief assessments at least once per week to determine if the intervention is having the desired effect.  Web based progress monitoring tools provide "intelligent" recommendations to professions so they know when to change to a different intervention and when to stay the course. 

Consideration by the School-Based Team for Full Evaluation

Before a full evaluation is recommended, the team could review the following types of data that have already been generated about the child.  It would be expected that for a child to potentially have a disability that:

The child would be very low in relationship to the rest of his/her class.   For a child to eventually be called disabled it would be expected that the child would be at or near the bottom of the class.  More likely, the child would stick out like a sore thumb in the class.  Since scores are available on all children in the class, it is easy to see where the referred child ranks.   Legally most of us are required to rule out cultural or educational disadvantage as a potential contributor to a child’s learning problem.  In low performing schools, many children may be able to exhibit a large discrepancy between where they are learning and where they are expected to be learning.  However, if many children appear to be performing similarly to the referred child, then questions must be asked about cultural or educational disadvantage.  Why are there several children in a class who are very low compared to national standards?  Can something be done for all of those children together, rather than attempting to refer them one at a time? 

Lack of Motivation would be Ruled out.  Data from the can’t do/won’t do assessment can be used to rule out lack of motivation; something in many states we are required to do.   A child who simply won’t do his work is not likely to have a disability.  He or she merely needs to be motivated.  

Progress Monitoring Data would show Lack of Academic Acceleration.   Evidence that an intervention was used and was not effective would provide some information about the child being “resistant” to intervention within general education.  This may point to the need for more intensive services that special education can provide.  Often the interventions that have already been applied to the child can “count” as a legally mandated pre-referral intervention which makes for efficient use of limited resources.   

STEEP is a Validated Practice

      Each of the gates within the model have undergone separate testing.  Gates 1 and 3 have undergone extensive testing by a large number of researchers.  In general, the curriculum-based evaluation used in Gates 1 and 2 has been around for many years and research has supported its use in decision making.  Books by Shinn (1985) or Shapiro (1986) provide excellent reviews of this extensive literature.  Likewise, the use of interventions prior to referral is not only legally mandated by IDEA, but there is extensive research support suggesting that well designed interventions reduce the need for referral.  A recent paper by Gresham (2001) at the U.S. Office of Special Education's LD summit (August 27, 2001) reviewed much of this literature.  The can’t do/won’t do assessment is a newer procedure with only a few published studies thus far (See Noell, G. H., Gansle, K. A., Witt, J. C., Whitmarsh, E. L., Freeland, J. T., LeFleur, L. H., Gilbertson, D. A. & Northup, J. (1998).  Effects of contingent reward and instruction on oral reading performance at differing levels of passage difficulty.  Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 31, 659-664).  

In addition to research on the individual components of the process, we have investigated and evaluated the STEEP model as a whole. VanDerHeyden, et al (2002; see also recent research on STEEP by clicking here) used a comprehensive assessment and intervention process to establish a “gold standard” as to whether a child truly did or did not have a problem. Teacher referral was accurate only 19% of the time in 406 cases, whereas the STEEP process was accurate 53% of the time in saying a child was a problem when the child truly did have a problem. Teacher referral was less accurate (89%) than STEEP (95%) in identifying which children did not have a problem. That is, teachers tended to identify many students who ultimately did not have a valid problem and miss students who had a valid problem. Given the finding that teacher referral was accurate less than 20% of the time and given the importance assigned to teacher judgment, it seems important to take a closer look at a broader range of variables.   In addition, this same study found that classroom context significantly and negatively impacted the accuracy of teacher referral. That is, teachers became much less accurate at identifying students who did and did not have a problem in both low-achieving and high-achieving classrooms, whereas STEEP maintained or achieved even greater accuracy across contexts.

Information about STEEP is Available by contacting Joe Witt.