Overview:

STEP™ (Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress) is a developmental literacy assessment for Grades PreK-3 that includes a set of tools, tightly aligned with scientifically established milestones in reading development, to follow the progress of pre-kindergarten through third grade students.

The University of Chicago Urban Education Institute (UEI) has developed STEP™ over the last 9 years and has worked with Chicago Public Schools and others in studying its impact. STEP™ is most appropriate for districts and schools that are practicing balanced literacy and are interested in the use of formative assessment data to inform instructional improvement.

 

Using STEP™ has the following benefits:

      

     ·    Accessible formative assessment data on all Pre-K-3 students that provides teachers with information about students reading strengths and needs and thus allows teachers to provide the crucial targeted instruction needed to accelerate each students reading progress

      

     · Accelerated reading achievement in grades Pre-K-3 through identifying early students who need additional support.  This encourages proactivity rather than a reflection on deficits after the fact.  It also creates an information base that supports collective and publicly held responsibility for student progress at the school level

      

     · Capacity building for teachers in understanding the developmental reading process of students, interpreting data, and making evidence-based decisions about instruction

      

     · Deepened expertise of coaches, principals and district leaders to closely follow learning trends in their schools, to plan and tailor professional development for teachers that responds to student learning needs, and to sustain and deeply embed the initiative in classroom and schools over time

      

Formative assessment data correlated to accountability data. STEP™ provides strong evidence on how students will perform on summative standardized tests. However, the power of formative assessment data differs from the summative data yielded by high-stakes state assessments.  STEP™ enables the diagnosis of individual learners needs as well as the examination of school and district-wide patterns that can lead to the improvement of teaching and the acceleration of student progress during the course of the school year.

 

Professional Development:

 

Professional development sessions address key issues regarding effective STEP™ implementation.

Sessions discuss assessment integration into the web of classroom instruction through:

                ·    embedded discussions about the evidence of student learning,

                ·    pushing teachers to anticipate students' future competencies and

           the instructional implications, and

                ·    creating early flags to organize support for struggling readers.

                 

Sessions deal with understanding comprehension and book-level sophistication through:

                ·    incorporating language development and probing analytical and

                         critical thinking, and

                ·    facilitating discussions with students that builds on their

                         understanding of the texts.

                 

Sessions help teachers understand the developmental process surrounding literacy by:

     ·     considering the specific skills that students need to  progress as  a reader in combination with how teachers can connect skills and strategies through reading connected texts, and

      

     · placing student learning in a coherent framework for thinking about strategic instructional decisions to accelerate progress (i.e. common language for talking about evidence).

      

The results of professional development sessions are many, including:

                ·    pushing professional dialogue to focus on what students could do

                         as readers and added specificity around what "struggling  

                         readers" means,

                ·        establishing a common language for discussing student learning,

                         creating a context for critical discussion of work based on the  

                          evidence of student learning, and

                 

                ·    moving the discussion to trends across classrooms or grade

                         levels.

                 

 

 

 

Data Management:

 

The STEP™ tool data management system provides reporting and analysis at the school, grade, and individual student level. It contains both current performance data as well as historical data for each assessment administration to assess the rate with which students are progressing.

The STEP™ Wall shows students, each represented by a gray “card,” at their corresponding Step at any time point during the year.

STEP™ Individual student displays focus on the details of the assessment components. These are available by clicking on the student’s “card” from the wall displays.

 

Contacts:

 

For more information about STEP™ (Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress), please contact Maggie Walsh.

Maggie Walsh

Urban Education Institute

walsh1@uchicago.edu

 

Laura Walsh Giesecke provides technical support to CPS schools currently using the STEP™ tool data management system. 

Laura Walsh Giesecke

Urban Education Institute

lwalsh@uchicago.edu

Link to STEP™ data management system:   https://www.steptool.org

STEP targets