This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers in the Neag School of Education are bringing a whole child screening assessment to a company that provides schools with a connected set of solutions that turn every student signal into timely, equitable, coordinated and measurable tools to track and manage supports. UConn's Technology Commercialization Services (TCS) facilitated the connection, as the university has licensed the ESSY Whole Child Screener to Metamorphix.
The latter will incorporate the screening program into Cascades, a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) whole child platform. "We are excited to be able to put our ESSY Whole Child Screener into the hands of school staff so quickly," says Sandra Chafouleas, a UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Neag professor of school psychology and one of the developers of the ESSY Whole Child Screener. "The goal of screening is to get students well-matched supports sooner to help them thrive." The ESSY (Expanding Screening to Support Youth) Whole Child Screener was developed through a grant from the U.S.
Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. In addition to Chafouleas, other co-principal investigators on the project include Amy Briesch, M.A. '05, Ph.D. '09, professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University, and two other Neag faculty: Jackie Caemmerer, associate professor of school psychology, and Jessica Koslouski, assistant research professor in educational psychology. Through the grant, the Project ESSY team sought to develop a comprehensive and strengths-based screener to improve schools' understanding of and responses to student challenges.
"Consider a student who is having behavior challenges every morning. The typical response would be to create a behavior plan or incentive system with the child, but maybe that doesn't address the reason," Koslouski says. "For example, what if the child is experiencing food insecurity and arriving at school hungry each morning?
Access to breakfast through the school meals program would likely be the better intervention. By screening across domains, the ESSY Screener helps schools to recognize these varied influences on student development." As part of the development of the screener, the Project ESSY team gathered multiple rounds of feedback from school administrators, teachers, parents, students and advisory boards to establish the feasibility of the assessment. Then, they conducted a large pilot test to validate it and learn how schools used it to guide decision-making, the results of which are published in the journal School Mental Health.
"School leaders expressed appreciation for the holistic view it gave them about their students. They shared that it aligned with their philosophies about child development and they hadn't yet seen a tool that was so well-rounded," Koslouski says. Once the ESSY Screener was developed, the UConn team began looking for an educational technology company to make the screener more widely available.
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