25  Introduction

The Multitudes universal screener uses multiple measures to estimate a student’s risk of reading difficulty by the end of the academic year. Performance on Multitudes does not diagnose disability, but instead indicates a need for more targeted instruction and possibly further evaluation. Administration in the first half of the year, following initial instruction of at least eight weeks for kindergarteners and four to six weeks for first and second graders, supports accurate identification while leaving opportunity for instruction to address identified needs.

Screening is only effective if it leads to the accurate identification of students in need of intervention. If the screening threshold is too low, students may be missed, and if the threshold is too high, students or groups of students may be over-identified. Therefore, in evaluating the performance of the screener, decisions are guided by maximizing classification accuracy. In setting these parameters for screening it is important to maximize sensitivity to reduce the number of children that may be missed by the screening. However, specificity is also important to reduce the number of false positives, or the number of children that are inaccurately identified by the screening. Ultimately, screening prioritizes sensitivity over specificity to support early identification and increase the likelihood that children will receive the support they need before reading problems become entrenched.

This chapter heavily draws on and, in part, reproduces analyses discussed in more detail in (Siebert et al. 2025).

Siebert, Julian M, Phaedra Bell, Nuria Gutiérrez, Mónica Zegers, Eric Falke, Benjamin W Domingue, Yaacov Petscher, et al. 2025. “Differences in Reading Screening Accuracy by Percentile Cutoff and English Proficiency: Feature Selection and Group-Wise Prediction Evaluation.” Reading Research Quarterly, e70074. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.70074.