Universal Screening Can Unlock A Wide Range of Talents, Part 1
By Ed Finkel
To design a talent development model that taps into the strengths of all students, education leaders and gifted coordinators should undertake universal screening, according to researchers from CTD and throughout the field of gifted education. Doing so will produce the greatest impacts for students of all talent profiles, as laid out in this first part of a two-part series on the subject (part two covers the hows and whys).
The "Big Picture" Planning Process
This process needs to start with an understanding of the desired outcomes and what unmet needs the school or district is trying to address, says Melissa Hinshaw, coordinator of assessment at CTD, adding that schools using a process like multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) can lean on those structures so they’re not “reinventing the wheel.”
“We want to make sure that we’re not only thinking about talent development programs for those who are perceived as high ability,” she says. “All students have talents and interests, no matter where they fall on a traditional bell curve. Research also tells us that early exposure and access is critical in talent development, so successful school programs are going to embed high-quality, cognitively complex activities for all students, especially in the early grades.”
“Challenge can be either invigorating or frustrating. If we understand students’ individual goals and interests, we can stretch them academically in ways that capitalize on intrinsic motivation because they will likely have a higher tolerance for hard work and even some frustration in those areas. If we’re thoughtful and strategic in how we make use of that data … , it can become something that can benefit all students.” - Dr. Eric Calvert
Starting with Enrichment for All
Rather than only offering strengths-based opportunities to students above an arbitrary “cut score,” commonly around the 95th percentile, talent development approaches are less rigidly exclusive and more responsive to students’ readiness and interests, says Eric Calvert, associate director at CTD.
“When a student has, for example, consistently higher scores in verbal ability or reading than they do in math or quantitative reasoning, that often indicates not just stronger ability in that area, but also greater interest,” he says. “Challenge can be either invigorating or frustrating. If we understand students’ individual goals and interests, we can stretch them academically in ways that capitalize on intrinsic motivation because they will likely have a higher tolerance for hard work and even some frustration in those areas. If we’re thoughtful and strategic in how we make use of that data … , it can become something that can benefit all students.”
Scott Peters, assessment implementation director at Curriculum Associates and a former CTD advisory board member, notes that absent a talent development pathway for all students, few have the groundwork for gifted services. “If you’re identifying students for a sixth-grade services … if you don’t do anything until the end of fifth grade, when you’re identifying students, then a lot of what you’re going to be identifying them based on is, who has had opportunities to develop the skills you’re now measuring?” he says.
“If you’re identifying students for a sixth-grade services … if you don’t do anything until the end of fifth grade, when you’re identifying students, then a lot of what you’re going to be identifying them based on is, who has had opportunities to develop the skills you’re now measuring?” - Dr. Scott Peters
Secondly, Peters says, any talent development programs need to focus on the kinds of prerequisite skills necessary for success in the related pathway. If a school or district is identifying which fifth graders need advanced math, for example, but “the talent development programs are all kind of related to generic critical thinking, it’s not going to change identification rates,” he says. “So we need to have alignment between the talent development programming, the services that are going to be provided, and the identification system.”
The Role of Universal Screening
Universal screening uses measurements to better understand students’ current and potential levels of achievement, Hinshaw says. While national standardized assessments can provide a baseline for context, more differentiated measurements can account for local conditions or students’ own qualities, and MTSS can be a useful tool to identify where students are in their learning journeys and what levels of support they need. “The universal screening process can help educators start to create a profile of student data around which they can make decisions,” she says.
Universal screening also ensures that students are not overlooked because they did not receive a nomination or referral from a teacher or parent, which often amounts to “gatekeeping” that disproportionately impacts those from different cultural, linguistic or economic backgrounds, Calvert says, adding that studies have shown as many as 30% to 40% of students who might have been identified as gifted never had the opportunity to take the cut-score assessment.
“We’re looking at giftedness as an outcome, almost as much as we’re thinking of it as a characteristic—as something that emerges when a student’s potential meets the right kinds of opportunities and support,” - Dr. Eric Calvert
“We’re looking at giftedness as an outcome, almost as much as we’re thinking of it as a characteristic—as something that emerges when a student’s potential meets the right kinds of opportunities and support,” he says. “We can actually help more students achieve, and perform, and grow at that traditional gifted level, if we know more about where their strengths lie and how to motivate them.” And MTSS can help triage students who need enrichment in one specific subject, even if they don’t “score well” across the board, he adds.
Without universal screening, there’s no chance of identifying all students who would benefit from a given service, Peters says. “Always, always, always, you will miss fewer kids if you universally screen,” he says. “It’s very similar to any kind of MTSS policies because what we are doing is proactively seeking out kids who might be under-challenged in their current context. MTSS is not about designating remedial kids or advanced kids, it’s about getting kids in their zone of proximal development. … It shouldn’t be about: advanced kids over here, special ed kids over here. It should be one, integrated system.”
In a true MTSS system, before the school year starts a principal would be reviewing student data to determine who would be ill-served by the core instruction, vs. how many need a tier-two or tier-three intervention, Peters says. “Whether or not you receive a particular MTSS intervention depends on what you need compared to the core curriculum in your local setting,” he says.
Outcomes and Impact
In the end, universal screening helps ensure that all students have the opportunity to participate in services for which they are ready, and that they are growing apace academically, Hinshaw says. “Do we have them placed correctly in the learning intervention?” she says, adding that screening should take place on an ongoing basis to continue to gather continuous information and update the answer to that question.
Ideally, universal screening should prompt educators to examine all students for where they are “at-potential,” Calvert says, leaning into how each learner can leverage their strengths and building self-efficacy. Otherwise, “When something gets hard, they just quit because they think, characteristically, ‘I’m not that smart,’ vs., ‘I need to try this a different way,’ ” he says. “Being able to get that additional feedback about their growth over time is really important,” and this should be seen “as an opportunity for additional growth and not just a reward for having arrived at that status of being declared a gifted student.”
One obvious outcome of implementing universal screening is missing fewer students who need services, which creates a series of practical challenges, Peters says. “You’ve got to be ready for that,” he says. “You’ve got to have enough chairs. You’ve got to have enough textbooks.” In addition, universal screening identifies a wider diversity of students, not only in areas like race and gender but also “more borderline readiness,” he adds. “You’re going to have to be ready to support a broader range of talent than just the obvious cases that you were getting under a referral-based or more exclusive system.”
Successfully implementing universal screening requires finding the right mix of assessment tools and data sources, along with policy shifts, resource commitments and change management strategies optimal to implement this with fidelity, while confronting a variety of myths about these shifts. We will have more on these “whys” and “hows” in part 2 of this series!