Core Metric Details
Oral Reading Fluency (ORF)
Definition: A student’s ability to read aloud smoothly or with natural ease.
Calculate: Divide the words pronounced correctly (mispronunciations & skips excluded) by the number of minutes taken to read a passage (off-task speech and long pauses excluded).
Scale Used: Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) is the scale commonly used to measure ORF and is supported by decades of research for screening and progress monitoring.
Research: Hasbrouck and Tindal developed the original research (ERIC - Education Resources Information Center ORF has been nationally normed with corresponding grade-level percentiles and is aligned with scales like Lexile and Developmental Reading Assessment.
❗NOTE: The instructional reading level displayed is calculated from a concordance with WCPM.
Reading Assistant Reading Mastery (ARM)
Definition: A student’s grade level is equivalent to their reading ability in years and months.
Scale Used: ARM maps directly to grade-level expectations keyed to a year and month of instruction.
Research: AREA scaling incorporates information about words correctly and incorrectly pronounced, in relation to the average Age of Acquisition.
Purpose: ARM scores will be produced for every student who completes the screening process, even if they cannot read connected text and are still building foundational skills. Reading Assistant reports the actual Percentile Rank (PR) of each student based on their composite ARM score, and proficiency levels are keyed off PR ranges. Specifically, PRs 1-24 indicate "Below Proficiency," PRs 25-49 indicate "Approaching Proficiency," PRs 50-74 indicate "Meeting Proficiency," and PRs 75-99 indicate "Demonstrating Mastery."
High Frequency Words
Definition: Reading Assistant reports a student’s mastery of a series of words commonly referred to as High Frequency Words. The list of words is associated with a grade-level timeline for mastery and is composed of words from the Dolch list, Fry’s list, and HMH Into Reading High Frequency Words. Each time a child is asked to read a word from the high frequency word list, Reading Assistant scores their reading as correct or incorrect, and this is recorded in the Skills Reports for teachers.
While some of the words do not follow decoding patterns, such as the words “the” or “I,” some words are decodable but are included in the list due to their frequent appearance in literature.
High Frequency Words in Reading Assistant: Reading Assistant’s word corpus includes over 300 High Frequency Words. While learning High Frequency Words can improve a child’s reading confidence and fluency, it’s important to note that phoneme and grapheme instruction and practice are crucial for learning to read and developing knowledge of High Frequency Words. Recognizing words without verbally decoding is valuable, but memorization cannot replace explicit phonics instruction.
In Reading Assistant, students will sometimes accurately decode a high frequency word but still have it appear as incorrect in the Skills Report. For example, a first grader was accurately decoding the High Frequency word “an” but Reading Assistant showed this skill as unmastered. After additional inspection and listening to recordings of the student, it was clear the child was reading a sentence like, “I see an elephant” as “I see a elephant.” The child was accurately decoding “an” but incorrectly changing it to “a” because she didn’t understand the vowel correspondence. In situations like these, Reading Assistant is providing information about high frequency word recognition that goes beyond decoding or memorization.
Scale Used: Teachers can find a student’s specific performance with the various High Frequency Words in the Skills Reports.
Phonological Awareness
Definition: A student’s ability to recognize and combine phonemes in different ways to produce words. It is a broadly defined skill that includes an awareness of word-sound correspondence, rhyming, and phonics.
Scale Used: Phoneme mastery is expressed as Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF). Reading Assistant captures PSF from all the corresponding phonemes within words read by students. Students are scored based on how well each phoneme is being pronounced. A student is scored by the percentage of times phonemes are correctly pronounced. PSF is an unweighted average over the 44 phoneme scores.
Research: Reading Assistant’s corpus of words is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict), which contains a mapping to 44 distinct phonemes recognized by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA; https://www.dyslexia-reading-well.com/44-phonemes-in-english.html). The words of a story are broken down into all the phonemes it contains.
❗NOTE: All 44 phonemes may not appear in every story, especially for early readers. In these cases, only the phonemes that are observed are scored.
Vocabulary Size
Definition: The estimated number of words in a student’s expressive vocabulary; a measure of how many words the student can produce by speaking as a function of age.
Scale Used: Vocabulary Size is scaled using the Estimated Vocabulary Size (EVS).
Research: Reading Assistant’s estimate of expressive vocabulary is based on a large body of literature about the rate of vocabulary development as a function of different age ranges. This information has been combined from multiple published sources (see NCBI - WWW Error Blocked Diagnostic Reading Assistant uses the AREA score in combination with a nonlinear growth function (inferred from published research) to estimate the number of words in the student’s expressive vocabulary. Benchmarks for this scale are associated with typical ranges of values for students at various grade levels.
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