Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress (STEP)
An assessment system to support classroom practice based on evidence of students' progress as readers

The STEP Literacy Assessment provides a set of tools, tightly aligned with scientifically established milestones in reading development, to follow students' progress from kindergarten through third grade. These tools are organized into a developmentally sequenced set of tasks that can help a teacher understand the developmental status of individual students and a class of students at any given point. They also help a teacher analyze students' progress over time. The computer-based STEPTool supports use of STEP assessment data.

STEP Literacy Assessment:

• Builds on a theoretically-based description of developmental stages of student reading
• Empirically establishes a set of diagnostic criteria for understanding students' progress
• Explicitly links critical elements in reading development into an integrated literacy assessment system

Problems of Practice
Teachers who take on a comprehensive literacy approach to instruction engage in complex teaching practices rooted in the developmental reading process. Rather than providing instruction that is scripted and routinely delivered, teachers must actively develop their classroom practice based on evidence of how their students are progressing as readers. Reliable and valid assessment of students is not only crucial, but central to this teaching endeavor.

Value Added
The STEP Literacy Assessment is designed to support an interactive process of teaching and learning. It provides rich data-based descriptions of students' developmental profiles that facilitate classroom-level instructional planning. It also provides more detailed individual student-level data for diagnosing the needs of particular student readers.

The STEP Literacy Assessment was developed at the Center for Urban School Improvement (USI) at the University of Chicago by researchers in collaboration with affiliated USI teachers. Contact: , USI