Official State of Rhode Island website

State of Rhode Island Department of Education

Mathematics Screening Guidance

Rhode Island Board of Education Secondary Regulations §2.2.1 and Rhode Island General Law §16-7.1-2 state that LEAs must develop a screening process to identify K-12 students in need of additional diagnostic assessment and instructional support in Math.

Screening assessments are a critical component of an LEA’s Comprehensive Assessment System and MTSS framework. “Screening in math can be compared to other health screeners like checking weight using a scale, checking blood pressure, or taking one’s temperature. All these health screeners provide a check on health risk while math screeners provide a sense of a student’s academic health. When educators utilize reliable, valid, and efficient assessment systems as screeners, they can identify students earlier who might be at-risk in math, thus allowing for intervention to be delivered in a timelier manner” (Lembke, 2024). 

Longitudinal research strongly suggests that students who perform poorly on simple mathematics problems at the end of kindergarten and first grade are likely to continue to perform poorly in mathematics through fourth grade (Duncan et al., 2007; Jordan, Kaplan, Ramineni, & Locuniak, 2009; Morgan, Farkas, & Wu, 2009, as cited in Clarke et al.,2012). 

Mathematics screening assessments ARE (RIDE, 2010):

  • Used as a first alert or indication of being at risk for deficits in mathematics skills or concepts.

  • Administered to all students before instruction.

  • Quick and easy to administer to a large number of students.

  • Generally used to assess key skills that are indicators of a students’ larger skill set, rather than an in-depth analysis of the standards.

  • Correlated with content and/or instructional objectives germane to grade level performance.

  • Rarely able to provide specific information needed to determine the most appropriate intervention or target for instruction.

Mathematics screening assessments ARE NOT:

  • Designed to identify or diagnose a specific math learning disability.

  • Interim or Benchmark assessments on their own

    • Mathematics Screeners can be viewed as a subset of an interim assessment with a specific focus on screening for risk of mathematical difficulty, but do not delve deep enough to ascertain what the specific difficulties are or why those difficulties exist.

Mathematics screening assessments should be used to answer questions, including but not limited to (Lembke, 2024):

  • Which students are experiencing mathematics difficulty?

  • Which students are at risk for mathematics difficulty and need further diagnostic assessment(s) and/or additional interventions, and how consequential are those risks?

  • In which areas of math is a student struggling?

  • How will the screening data be used?

  • Is the screener reliable and valid for the intended use?

  • What is the cost for the screening compared to the utility? For instance, if this is the first time implementing math screening, a school may want to pilot a free or low-cost screener with a small group of students to get a sense of implementation concerns

  • How long does it take to complete?

  • How is the data gathered, where is it stored, and how easy is it to access?

  • Who needs to be trained to administer the screening tool, and how difficult is it to train?

  • How are the assessment results presented?

  • What level of ongoing support is needed?

  • Can the screening tool be used across grades?

  • Does the tool correctly classify students into the correct ranges according to their skill levels and are students from a variety of backgrounds and programs accurately represented? (e.g., differently abled students, multilingual learners)

Access Mathematics Screening Guidance Document