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.