USNS Overall Performance Levels

The Universal Screeners for Number Sense (USNS) are designed to make students’ mathematical thinking visible. Although Forefront provides an overall performance level, the results of individual tasks often provide the most useful information for planning instruction.

Detailed rubrics describe the skills and concepts assessed by each task. Forefront also provides question-by-question instructional resources to help teachers respond to areas where students may need additional support.

Forefront calculates an overall performance level for each USNS assessment. These criterion-referenced levels provide a high-level summary of how a student performed across the assessment:

Proficient, Level 3 (green): The student performed well and appears ready for most of the grade-level content assessed.

Basic, Level 2 (yellow): The student demonstrated success with many tasks but may benefit from instruction, scaffolding, or practice in specific areas.

Below Basic, Level 1 (orange): The student experienced difficulty with several tasks. Review the task-level results and consider whether further assessment is needed to identify starting points for targeted instruction.

Well Below Basic, Level 0 (red): The student experienced difficulty throughout much of the assessment. Additional assessment, targeted support, and progress monitoring should be considered.

Important: Performance levels describe overall results on the assessment. They should not be used as labels for students. Districts are encouraged to use the language already used in data meetings and family communications to describe students’ progress toward grade-level expectations. For example, Proficient might be described as Meeting Expectations or Mastery. Students who are not yet meeting expectations might be described as Approaching, Developing, or Needing More Strategic Support.

Two students with the same overall performance level may demonstrate very different strengths and instructional needs. Review task-level results before determining next steps.

The USNS are scored first at the task level. Each task or task set has a rubric that assigns a performance level based on the student’s response. Forefront then calculates the mean of those task-level performance values to determine the overall level:

The score ranges shown in the performance-band charts are not conventional raw-point totals beginning at zero. They are totals derived from the performance levels assigned to individual tasks.

Many USNS tasks have a lowest available task score greater than zero. Therefore, even when a student receives the lowest available performance level on every task, the sum of those task-level values will still be greater than zero. The first number shown in each chart is the lowest possible total for that particular assessment.

Some tasks, particularly within the midyear assessments, include an explicit Level 0 response category to draw attention to critical unfinished learning. However, Level 0 is not available on every task, so the assessment’s overall score range still may not begin at zero.

For written and fluency tasks: Enter the point value identified in the scoring guide rather than selecting a performance level. Forefront automatically converts the entered points into the appropriate task-level performance value before calculating overall performance.

The ranges differ by grade level and assessment because each screener contains a different collection of tasks and task-level scoring criteria. Performance bands should not be interpreted as percentages or as the number of questions answered correctly.

Overall performance levels can help educators:

Overall levels are most useful when interpreted alongside the student’s task-level results, classroom evidence, previous assessment results, and teacher observations. Averaging performance across tasks can obscure important differences in what individual students understand. Instructional groups should therefore be based primarily on shared learning needs rather than overall color bands alone.

The performance bands in this article are criterion referenced. They describe performance in relation to the skills and concepts assessed by the USNS.

Percentile ranks provide a different perspective by comparing a student or group with other students who completed the same assessment. In Forefront, users can view:

For step-by-step directions about norm-referencing, refer to the article Using USNS National Norms and the Global Cohort.