How does assessment work within MTSS? How can we ensure that the correct assessments are assigned to the students who need them? When and how should we assess students? Learn about how assessment can be integrated into MTSS in the presentation below.
How has reading about assessment informed or changed your understanding of assessment within multi-tiered system support (MTSS)?
Assessment is personally one of my biggest gaps as a teacher. I am not very good at being on top of it and at conducting either formative or summative assessments frequently enough. Honestly, the first article especially convinced me that MTSS was not something teachers themselves could do, and that the systematic approach to assessment needs to be ran by a district who can maintain software to keep track of assessments and have the resources and time to evaluate and select assessments. The article seemed frequently to be directed toward educators, but it really convinced me that MTSS was outside our scope of practice. It could be something that we could support and collaborate with, but it seems so enormous that it really should be ran by a district or by a specialized employee, not by a team of teachers doing it off the side of their desks. Before I read the article, I believed I could be a major collaborator in MTSS, and now I am thinking that it very much needs to come from above.
How might a diverse range of assessments, including universal screening, progress monitoring and diagnostic assessments, contribute to a more effective and equitable approach to supporting students’ reading development? Can you consider any potential challenges in implementing such a comprehensive assessment system?
I think that more assessment documents would certainly give a more accurate picture of a student’s strengths and weaknesses. Bailey, Colpo, and Foley (2020) suggest that each student should have at least six to nine data points in order to make informed decisions about interventions (12). Tracking and entering this much data, and then evaluating it, reporting on it, and sharing it, seems like an onerous amount of work. I am nervous about MTSS turning teachers into data managers rather than teachers. I believe firmly that we need to incorporate evidence-based practices into our teaching, but I wonder if this much data management may be beyond our scope. I can see resource teachers plotting or submitting basic data into a responsive software after assessments, but surely there must be a platform that will make that reasonably easy for them to do so. Maybe I am being cynical here. I was really excited about MTSS last module, but now I am apprehensive, and am worrying about the addition of all of this new work to a teacher’s already full daily workload.
Reflecting on your current assessment practices, how well do they align with the recommendations and strategies presented in the document?
I absolutely need to do more assessment, and to make sure that I do it quickly and am transparent in my assessments, in order to better support my students in developing their skills. I admire the efficiency imagined in these documents. I would foresee that this much assessment and progress monitoring would be a tonne of work and would take much more time than we currently have in our school. I would like to approach it as a different kind of work, rather than more work, but I believe that would need scheduled support for classroom teachers. In terms of aligning with the recommendations and strategies, I collect a lot of writing samples from my students in many different formats, and I use this to inform my instruction. I see, for example, that students generally need help with comma splices, and then we do a mini-lesson on those and I check in the next round of formal writing whether or not they have adjusted their writing. If not, we teach the concept in another way, and spend some time correcting samples. I could certainly teach from a more data-based mindset, and I will try hard to do so next year, evaluating the data I already collect more fully and regularly.
What challenges or barriers do you foresee when implementing these assessment practices within an MTSS framework, and how can you address them?
As I mentioned above, I truly do not think that we as teachers have time to run MTSS. I also doubt that administration would. I assume that district staff, especially district literacy staff, could have the time and resources to administer and oversee MTSS. Teachers could participate within it, of course, and could collaborate to collectively determine goals and monitor progress, but I do not see this as a teacher-level initiative. I am very visionary and would LIKE it to be, but I don’t think that I would have the time to contribute very meaningfully in a committee. I would LOVE to see MTSS in my school, and am planning to work with our Literacy Teacher and our Director of Instruction on implementing MTSS. I think that just doing the assessments within regular teaching for so many students (I usually have 150, but sometimes even more) would be an enormous amount of work, and I would hope that we could have resource or literacy teachers have blocks dedicated to doing assessments, if our school chose to pursue MTSS.
Considering the role of data in guiding instructional decisions, how might educators use assessment data effectively to tailor interventions and support struggling readers?
I think that we already do use data to adapt our teaching and to plan interventions for struggling students. We certainly can use it better, and we can ensure that our interventions become more data-driven if we have the opportunity to gather and evaluate data more systematically. The fidelity piece mentioned regularly throughout both articles was interesting to me, as I think that we often fail at delivering assessments consistently and as they are meant to be used. MTSS could reinforce this piece, and make it clear how important delivering assessments with fidelity is for overall monitoring of student progress. (I am sure that some teachers will still deliver the assessments their own way, and not in accordance with expectations, but maybe emphasizing it will cut down on that.) I might feel better about MTSS if I remember that we are already doing all of these assessments, and that we are already collecting all of this data. At this point, it is just not being looked at systematically. If I can convince myself (and likely others) that this isn’t more work, but it is the same work being seen through a prism, I might feel better about adding to teacher workload.
How can you collaborate with other educators, specialists and support staff to create a more comprehensive and effective MTSS-based assessment plan?
I would strike a literacy team to oversee MTSS in general, including assessment. The literacy team would include the Learner Support teachers, the administration, the Literacy Teacher, and the Director of Literacy Instruction. I would like to see the district take on the responsibility of choosing assessment measures and making those easily available to all of us. I would also like the district to choose and make easily available some kind of tracking software that teachers could access, create reports from, and enter data into, as recommended in Bailey, Colpo, and Foley (2020, 3). I think that learner support teachers, literacy teachers, administration, and any other teachers who were interested could work together with the district’s Director of Literacy Instruction to create a shared vision, set goals, evaluate resources, monitor progress, and plan and deliver interventions. I would expect that MTSS would be necessarily collaborative, but I would expect that the district would take on the work of tracking and storing the data, and evaluating assessment tools and then making them available.
References
Bailey, T. R., Colpo, A. & Foley, A. (2020). Assessment practices within a multitiered system of supports. University of Florida, Collaboration for Effective Educator, Development, Accountability, and Reform Center. http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/tools/innovationconfigurations/
Ciullo, S., Lembke, E. S., Carlisle, A., Thomas, C. N., Goodwin, M., and Judd, L. (2016). Implementation of evidence-based literacy practices in middle school response to intervention: An observation study. Learning Disability Quarterly 39(1): 44-57.
Durrance, S. (2023). Implementing MTSS in secondary schools: Challenges and strategies. SERVE Center. https://region6cc.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/ImplementingMTSSinSecondarySchools_2022_RC6_003.pdf
Good, R. H. III, Kaminski, R. A., Dewey, E. N., Wallin, J., Powell-Smith, K. A., and Latimer, R. (2013). Acadience Reading K-6 Technical Manual. https://acadiencelearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Acadience_Reading_K-6_Technical_Manual.pdf
Napolitan, L. (2022, August 30). MTSS in middle school: Strategies for success. Branching Minds. https://www.branchingminds.com/blog/mtss-middle-school-success#:~:text=MTSS%20supports%20middle%20schoolers%20by,and%20lack%20of%20consistent%20interventions.
National Center on Intensive Intervention at the American Institutes for Research (2023). Using diagnostic data to inform intervention planning. https://intensiveintervention.org/resource/using-diagnostic-data-inform-intervention-planning?overridden_route_name=entity.node.canonical&base_route_name=entity.node.canonical&page_manager_page=node_view&page_manager_page_variant=node_view-panels_variant-4&page_manager_page_variant_weight=-3
Peak, C. (2023). Benchmark Assessment System reading test is widely used and often wrong. Sold a Story. APM Reports. https://www.apmreports.org/story/2023/12/11/benchmark-assessment-system-reading-test-often-wrong
Raymond, Baerg, M. (2025). An overview of multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS): What, why, and how. Learning Teachers’ Association of BC Workshop.