MTSS Diagnostic Assessments

Literacy Diagnostics

iSTEEP includes four reading diagnostics designed to identify the specific skill or skills that may be limiting a student’s reading development. Together, they move from early foundational reading skills to advanced word reading and then into meaning and comprehension.

The Early Literacy Basic Diagnostic focuses on the earliest foundational skills, including Onset-Rime, Initial Sound Fluency, Segmenting, Deleting Initial Sounds, Nonsense Word Fluency, and Sight Words. These measures help identify weaknesses in phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, decoding, and automatic word recognition.

The Early Literacy Advanced Diagnostic extends the sequence into more advanced phonics and word-reading skills, including Consonant Digraphs and Blends, Vowel Teams and Diphthongs, R-Controlled Vowels, CVCe patterns, Common Irregular Words, Spelling, and Multisyllabic Word Reading. These measures help identify more advanced decoding, orthographic, spelling, and complex word-reading weaknesses.

The iSkill for Reading (Finding the Reading Level) Diagnostic provides a recommendation if a student is in need an intervention focusing on comprehension skills, fluency skills, or early literacy skills. This measure also provides a student's instructional reading level.

The Morphology and Meaning Diagnostic extends assessment beyond word reading into the language and meaning skills needed for successful comprehension. It examines morphological awareness, vocabulary, sentence comprehension, passage comprehension, and inferencing. These skills are considered together so educators can determine whether a comprehension problem may originate in an earlier weakness such as morphology or vocabulary, or in higher-level language and reasoning.

Together, the three diagnostics help educators identify where the reading process begins to break down and where instruction should begin, rather than treating low reading performance as a single, undifferentiated problem.

iSkill Reading Fluency Assessment with the Testing Back Method

Students struggling to read fluently at their grade level typically face one of two issues. The first possibility is a lack of fundamental early literacy skills, which hinders their reading speed. The second is that while they possess the basic skills, they require further practice to enhance their reading fluency. For students in the second grade and above, our recommended approach is the Testing Back method. This process begins with an oral reading fluency assessment at the student's current grade level. If the student does not meet the expected standards, the assessment is then administered at the next lower grade level. This step-down approach continues until the student's fluent reading level is identified. We advise starting reading fluency interventions at this identified level. Should a student not demonstrate fluency at the second-grade level, an evaluation using early literacy diagnostics is suggested.

Linking Diagnostics to Progress Monitoring

iSTEEP connects diagnostic assessment directly to intervention and progress monitoring. For both the Early Literacy Diagnostics and the Morphology and Meaning Diagnostic, once the diagnostic identifies the most appropriate starting skill, educators can use a matching progress-monitoring measure for that same skill. This keeps assessment aligned with instruction and makes it possible to determine whether the intervention is producing the intended growth.

As students master an initial skill, instruction can move to the next skill in the developmental sequence, with a corresponding progress-monitoring measure available at that level as well. This creates a continuous instructional pathway: identify the skill, teach the skill, monitor the skill, and advance when mastery is demonstrated.

This precision matters. Once a diagnostic process has identified the specific skill that is limiting progress, returning to a broad reading or comprehension score for progress monitoring can obscure whether the intervention itself is working. A broad measure may combine several skills into one score or report areas that do not correspond directly to what is being taught. Once the precise skill to teach has been identified, progress monitoring should measure that same skill rather than return to a broad score that can hide the effect of instruction.

The iSTEEP model therefore preserves alignment across the full instructional cycle: diagnose the specific skill, intervene on that skill, monitor growth on that same skill, and move to the next skill when the student is ready.

Here's How it Works:

Identify Student Level within a Skills Ladder: Imagine a skill ladder, where each step builds upon the previous one. The diagnostic identifies the exact rung the student is on.

Identify the Type of Intervention Needed with the Instructional Hierarchy: We assess each student's skill mastery level relative to the Instructional Hierarchy, a research-backed method that pairs the most effective teaching strategy with the student's proficiency level. Instructional recommendations from the Instructional Hierarchy break into these three levels of skill mastery:

- Acquisition: Learning the skill for the first time with guidance.
- Fluency Building: Gaining practice and speed with the skill.
- Generalization: Applying the skill in different contexts.

Matching Instruction: An extensive line of research on the instructional hierarchy (see Codding, VanDerHeyden, & Chehayeb 2023), shows the recommended strategies work whereas interventions that are contraindicated don't work.

iSTEEP results precisely match instruction to the student's level in the hierarchy. For example, a student who knows multiplication but isn't very good at it would be identified as needing fluency-building instruction, which focuses on providing practice and feedback to improve speed and accuracy.

One Simple Solution

The math diagnostic assessment is part of an integrated three-stage approach, emphasizing consistency across all phases.

Stage 1: Diagnostics - Diagnostic assessment in the initial stage, the assessment identifies the student's proficiency in 20 key skills, establishing a baseline for targeted intervention.

Stage 2: Tailored Intervention - Interventions are then customized to develop these same 20 skills. The specificity of the intervention ensures that each skill identified in the diagnostic phase is addressed comprehensively.

Stage 3: Progress Monitoring - The process culminates with progress monitoring, utilizing an assessment that encompasses the identical 20 skills from the diagnostic assessment and the intervention phase.

Streamlining for Success: Aligning Interventions and Progress for Faster Growth

Imagine: Interventions seamlessly aligned, progress monitoring tailored to each skill, and laser-focused instruction that targets student needs with precision. This is the power of using identical skills across different stages of your program.

Why is this important? By aligning interventions and progress monitoring to exactly match the skills being taught, you create a clear path for student success. This laser focus ensures you're addressing the right areas, leading to faster, more noticeable progress for both you and your students.

The iSTEEP diagnostic goes beyond simply identifying what a student knows. It also pinpoints what they need to learn next, ensuring precise and effective instruction.

MTSS Diagnostic Assessments

MTSS Reading and Math Diagnostics