Note: Our current pilot client does not use an SEL assessment. The table below spells out in detail how tiering will work for customers who use RethinkEd’s SEL/wellness student self-assessment. As we sign on more customers who use other SEL/wellness assessments, we will add how to map assessment results to tiers accordingly.
Similar to the logic behind the tier recommendations for academic assessments, RethinkEd wants to leverage the work of the makers of wellness assessments (sometimes referred to as social-emotional learning assessments) when determining the level of support students need. For wellness assessments that provide categories of scores like RethinkEd does, the recommended tiers will be based on them. Typically for assessments that provide categories scores, the scoring reflects how well students are faring on wellness compared to peers. For example, RethinkEd’s wellness measure has scores of 1 to 5 that reflect percentiles according to grade level bands (e.g., grades 3 through 5, grades 6 through 8). A score of 1 corresponds to the 10th percentile and lower (labeled as “very low”), and a score of 2 corresponds to the 11th to 30th percentile (labeled as “low”; ERB 2019). Such approaches to scoring provide strong indication of how to recommend students for tiered interventions.
Although some wellness measures have scores offering comparisons that group students according to their ages or grade levels, some do not, opting instead to provide an overall score for students regardless of their age or grade level (e.g., SAIL Colab, 2020). We therefore use more general language when explaining our approach to recommending tiers below, omitting references to grade-level performance, than we do when explaining tier recommendations for academic assessments. A general guide to how we determine tier recommendations is:
· Tier 3: score category indicating that the student is much lower than average
· Tier 2: score category indicating that the student is lower than average
· Tier 1: score category indicating the student is about average or above average
To make this general guide more concrete, the table below gives the mapping of RethinkEd score bands to recommended tiers.
Table Mapping of RethinkEd Wellness Scores to Recommended Tiers for MTSS
| Numeric 1 to 5 band for RethinkEd Wellness assessment | Corresponding percentile compared to grade-level peers for RethinkEd Wellness assessment | Descriptive label for RethinkEd Wellness assessment |
Tier 3 (much lower than average) | 1 | 0 - 10 | Very low |
Tier 2 (lower than average) | 2 | 11 - 30 | Low |
Tier 1 (about average or above average) | · 3 · 4 · 5 | · 31 - 70 · 71 – 090 · 91 - 99 | · Average · High · Very high |