In yesterday’s episode (Season 2, Episode 3) of the Mafost Mashup, two reading systems were offered to ensure your school’s reading instruction is ready for the next shift.

One of those systems was Multigate Screeners. This post will focus in on multigate screeners for reading.

What is a Multigate Screener?

RTI starts with a universal screener. This is a process of assessing every student and ranking them to provide additional supports and interventions to students.

Using one assessment is good and can help you provide a general, nontargeted intervention.

Using more than one assessment tool is better because it tiers the data in conjunction with tiered and varied supports. This is the core of multigate screening, and here are the defining characteristics:

• Using more than one tool for the purpose of targeting interventions to student needs.
• Unidimensional assessment tools that are sensitive to student growth.
• Universal screening, not a full diagnostic of individual student reading ability.
• Highly reliable predictors of overall student ability in reading, not merely annual criterion-referenced exams.

Who are Multigate Screeners For?

All Students. Systems for enrichment, for acceleration, and for interventions, all require screeners to identify student needs. It’s not enough to use teacher referral (for GT, for SEL, or for academic need), which is full of intentional and unintentional bias.

Program Evaluators. Screeners are designed for identifying student needs, but if you use the right lead data, you can also use screeners to make formative evaluations of programs.

Teacher Teams. Informal, formative reading screeners that are used on a monthly basis such as reading fluency can help teachers gauge the average growth rates for classrooms and teachers. These data points form powerful feedback when used for A/B testing and collaborative conversations.

Brief Overview

While I didn’t discuss examples of multigate screeners, I do hope this brief overview provided insights on how your current universal screening system can be improved to get more for your learners and readers on campus!

You can listen to a copy of the recent Mafost Mashup, Reading Systems, below (if you’re on a mobile device click here to listen).