The primary purpose of the USNS is to serve as a universal screening tool. However, the assessments can also be used for diagnostic purposes.
While definitions of diagnostic assessment vary, they generally share the idea that a diagnostic assessment should provide useful, specific information about a student’s strengths and areas of need so that an effective instructional plan can be determined.
The USNS can provide information that is very helpful for diagnostic assessment. However, using the assessments for this purpose requires professional observation, documentation, and interpretation.
Observations During the USNS Assessments
The USNS assessments include performance-based tasks with detailed scoring guidance. Beyond recording scores, teachers should take note of students’ specific responses, strategies, and behaviors.
For example, trained educators may notice how students use their fingers, the counting strategies they apply to solve tasks, the automaticity and fluency with which they respond, and other details that reveal what a student knows and can do. These observations may also point to areas in which the student would benefit from targeted instruction.
During the assessment process, teachers should also attend to the student’s affect. For example, is the student overly uncertain, or do they appear to be guessing in their responses? These observations can help teachers understand how to more fully engage the student and support their learning.
Teachers may use Forefront’s notes tool to document these observations (learn more here) or record them using the provided note-catchers. In either format, these observations provide insights that can help teachers better support student learning.
Using Prior Grade-Level USNS Assessments
Teachers should begin with the student’s grade-level USNS, even when working with students who have already been identified as struggling.
Many tasks on the fall grade-level USNS are aligned not only with beginning-of-year grade-level expectations, but also with critical skills and concepts from the prior year. When students are not successful with particular tasks, the fall assessment can therefore help point teachers toward important areas for instructional support.
However, if the grade-level assessment does not adequately reveal what a student knows or provide clear starting points for instruction, teachers are encouraged to move to an earlier grade-level assessment. This may be appropriate when a student is unsuccessful with many tasks, relies on strategies that make their underlying understanding difficult to interpret, or demonstrates uneven performance that does not yet point to a clear instructional need.
In the fall, it is generally recommended that teachers move back one full year and begin with the previous fall’s screener.
When collecting this information in Forefront, teachers can self-assign an assessment to their class as outlined here. They can then use the Standard Analysis Report and the Assessed Standards view on the Parts page to visualize results.
Teachers may also use an intervention course to view results from the student’s current and prior grade levels side by side and to access assessments across grade bands more easily. Learn more about intervention-course configuration options here.
Identifying Areas for Targeted Instruction
Once an area has been identified for targeted instruction, teachers can select related items from the interview or written tasks across the USNS series to further reveal the student’s understanding. This can help teachers develop a more comprehensive understanding of the student’s prior knowledge and reasoning.
For example, a third-grade student may use one-to-one counting to solve a task involving equal groups rather than using a more efficient grouping or skip-counting strategy. To learn more about the student’s understanding, the teacher could review related tasks from an earlier USNS assessment that reveal how the student counts collections, organizes objects into groups, or reasons about repeated quantities. The student’s responses may help the teacher determine whether instruction should begin with developing more efficient counting strategies, understanding equal groups, or connecting repeated addition to multiplication.
If teachers have been using Forefront to collect unit-assessment data or have accumulated assessment results over time, they can also examine evidence from prior assessments to identify trends and perform root-cause analysis.
Monitoring Student Growth
Parallel tasks provide a quick way to reassess students and reveal changes in their understanding. Ideally, reassessment should take place after the student has received instruction or intervention.
The results can help teachers determine the effectiveness of their instructional efforts and identify any necessary adjustments. Learn more about how to use Forefront’s reassessment tools and the parallel tasks here.