Reading Assistant Reporting Overview

Reading Assistant Homepage

Reading Assistant assessments produce actionable, reliable, and valid information for teachers.
 

1. Improving their understanding of their students via “Active & Aided Listening.”

2. Monitoring Student Growth and Progress

3. Screening for Intervention, facilitating MTSS and RTI decision-making

4. Screening For Dyslexia

5. Grouping Students

6. Placing students and establishing the appropriate level of instruction and reading for each

7. Diagnosing specific skill gaps and

8. Creating differentiated lesson plans to ameliorate those gaps using the District’s curriculum.

 These include the following core metrics of reading:
 

Reading Assistant’s approach to reporting gives educators easy and transparent access to the complete set of data and insights generated through assessment, enabling decision-making. The following principles back up this approach:   

Reading Assistant reports on a comprehensive data set that other assessments cannot provide. This is possible because Reading Assistant listens to every student-word/phoneme interaction across multiple measures (assessment tasks).
 
Reading Assistant has data on student performance at a very detailed level (by word/phoneme/letter sound). The software can also provide educators with precise and individualized diagnostic information. The Reading Assistant Screener identifies specific skills each student is struggling with.  For example, like other Assessments, Reading Assistant will provide a general metric showing a student’s understanding of Phonemic Awareness.  Unlike other assessments, Reading Assistant will identify which of the approximately 140 common letter-sound correspondences in the English lexicon are not yet mastered by that student.    
These skill gaps are not inferred; the software directly observes them.
 

Reading Assistant reporting is organized around the Science of Reading.

Reading Assistant is grounded in the Simple View Of Reading Framework (SVRF). The Simple View is the standard model for understanding reading mastery and is the basis for Scarborough’s Reading Rope visualization. Reading Assistant uses the Simple View as the essential grounding for the Student Mastery Model (SMM). The SMM, in turn, serves as the core organization for all Reading Assistant Reports. Implicit in the SVRF is the idea that both word recognition skills and language comprehension abilities are necessary for reading.  Reading Assistant’s reports are organized to provide educators with information about student performance across the strands in the reading rope, enabling an understanding of a student’s overall reading ability.

Reading Assistant reporting is transparent and gives educators complete control.

Reading Assistant is entirely transparent and gives educators complete control over all data generated by the assessment.  Almost immediately after a student completes an evaluation, Reading Assistant provides teachers & coaches with an audio recording of the Oral Fluency portion of the evaluation (a Science of Reading Transcript).  The SoR Transcript shows how Reading Assistant scored each word within the passage.  Teachers do not need to guess about a student’s performance, educators can view and (if permissioned) rescore Reading Assistant’s word-by-word/item-by-item scoring using Reading Assistant’s recorded audio of the Screening interaction.

Reading Assistant reporting enables decision-making and actionability.

Reading Assistant reports are easy to access and use.  Every report was designed to answer one key question and to do so with clarity. Most Reading Assistant reports come with a set of configuration and filtering options. Most reports support batch printing. All reports use a RAG (red, amber, green) model to distinguish “positive” situations from “alerts” that require immediate attention.  Reading Assistant reports are designed to answer key educator questions, including:

Reporting Inventory

Reading Assistant delivers a vast array of reports, far too many in too many variations to enumerate exhaustively.  Here is an overview of some of the most critical reports in their standard formats.

Dyslexia Report:

The Risk Report answers the questions: Which of my students is at risk of dyslexia? Which of my students is likely to struggle with standard instruction? Reading Assistant identifies the signals and markers of Dyslexia as part of the Screening process.  This accumulation of information is then compiled into a Dyslexia Risk Indicator Score for each student.  These DRI scores can be accessed in Reading Assistant’s Dyslexia Report, shown here: Within the dyslexia report, students are displayed in a ranked list, with the highest dyslexia risk indicator score at the top.   Based on their DRI score, students are categorized into one of three groups:-                At risk of dyslexia, with strong signals (red in the image above)-                At risk of dyslexia, with weak signals (yellow in the image above)-                Low risk of dyslexia (green in the image above) The Dyslexia Report helps educators to make informed decisions about the need for additional, more in-depth dyslexia testing and aids in identifying students who need extra assistance with phonological awareness and phonics.

Progress Report
 

Questions:
Is the student making Progress?
Will the student score as proficient on the year-end summative assessment?

Reading Assistant’s Progress Report charts student performance over time against benchmarks.   The report has two primary purposes:

1. Illustrate a student’s progress to this moment;

2. Show the student’s projected (predicted) progress through the end of the school year on current course and speed.

Reading Assistant shows assessments within the progress report by score and over time, allowing educators to ascertain student growth quickly.  Additionally, Reading Assistant predicts student growth over time and generates an end-of-year predicted reading mastery. The blue-dotted growth line is determined by factoring in a scholar’s interactions with Reading Assistant – screening, progress monitors, scaffold sessions, and practice.

The Progress Monitoring Report also serves as an “Oral Reading History,” letting the teacher go back to listen and see students reading.  By simply clicking on a previous interaction (either in the chart or the table), the  SoR Transcript for that interaction is retrieved and displayed.
 

Benchmark Report

Questions:
How are my students doing compared to benchmarks?
How are my students doing compared to national peers?
 

The Benchmark Report makes it easy to compare how students in a class are doing relative to one another and general student populations.  The Benchmark Report shows the scores for the students’ most recent assessments but also contains explicit information about how those student scores compare to national norms at different grades. Cut points at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile ranks (PRs) are provided for easy interpretation. This allows educators to make both criterion-referenced and norm-referenced inferences about student performance. As with Tracking, scores are displayed graphically, along with student performance compared to national norms. Students are sorted from highest to lowest scores, with norm-referenced information used to color code the score bars. Scores falling below the 25th PR are red, scores between the 25th and 75th PR are yellow, and scores above the 75th PR are green. Reading Assistant’s benchmark report plots student’s scores for each of the core reading metrics (ORF, reading mastery, phonological awareness, high-frequency words, and vocabulary size) against district, state, or national benchmarks, displaying 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile cut lines so that educators can quickly identify which classes and students are showing on-pace growth. The Report organizes students by score for each core reading metric, allowing educators to quickly and visually group students who would benefit from similar instruction or help.

Further, Reading Assistant shows which students need additional help, flagging those tracking behind the expected growth of students nationally. Within the Benchmark Report, educators can select the desired benchmark and see how student performance compares to that benchmark in each core reading metric.  Student scores are then plotted against percentile rank cut lines, and students are color-coded so that educators can quickly identify which students are on track and which may need intervention.

Parent Report

Questions: How can I get more support from a student’s family network? How can I best communicate a student’s situation to their parents? Reading Assistant’s Parent Report is a snapshot of the status of a student at a moment in time. It displays the most current metrics to share with parents and provides actionable reading tips parents can use at home with students to help them build fundamental reading skills. The Parent Report contains brief and straightforward information that is helpful to parents.  In addition to a progress chart showing current performance and predicting growth over time in the selected core reading metric, the report provides information to contextualize those scores and help parents understand them. The Report identifies specific, family-friendly, and at-home-friendly activities parents can do to help their child improve reading. This includes everything from encouraging parents to read new stories with their child at home to providing specific recommendations for helping their child master particular skills. Tracking ReportQuestions: Which students have not yet been assessed? How do I get Reading Assistant to do what I need to do? The tracking report tells teachers about student engagement with Reading Assistant and lets teachers tell Reading Assistant how to work with each student.  The report:

1. Reports on whether a student has been screened

2. Let the teacher know if an issue during screening needs action.

3. Allows teachers to assign a new screening or progress monitor

4. Overviews how much reading a student has done with Reading Assistant in the current week

5. It enables a teacher to tell the Reading Assistant how to work with each student, including what language to employ in proctoring and tutoring.

Diagnostic Report

Questions: What skill gaps should I be helping this student surmount right now? What instructional resources will enable me to surmount those gaps? Has this student mastered the skills I just taught? The Diagnostic Report provides a deep profile of each student’s reading skills.  The Report is organized around the reading rope and the Curriculum being utilized.  The central idea of the report is to show a Mastery Map centered on the threads of the Reading Rope.  Each thread is a “Row,” with Word Recognition domains at the top and Language Comprehension domains at the bottom.  The threads “unfold in time, showing skills arranged consistent with the Scope & Sequence dictated by the chosen curriculum.  In other words, skills are shown from the 1st Kindergarten Unit up through 5th grade (the skill’s associated grade is shown at the top of the chart.  In the screenshot below, the skills shown are the ones associated with Kindergarten-Fall instruction.)Within the matrix created by Reading Rope threads on the left and Time (from K to 5) on the top, the report organizes each unit of the chosen curriculum in the curriculum’s instructional sequence.  These Units or Modules are shown as the Purple/Blue Headers.  Under each curricular block, specific Reading Skills targeted by Reading Assistant are shown as small boxes.  Each box is a Reading Assistant Skill that the software knows how to assess.   As a student reads and demonstrates the ability associated with that skill, Reading Assistant designates the mastery of that skill. The skill box shows grey when Reading Assistant has insufficient information to evaluate mastery.  If the student shows they have the skill, the box is green.  Conversely, if a student has shown that they have not yet acquired a skill, the box shows red.   The diagnostic report is a visual map of a student’s reading brain. The key value of the report is that teachers can hone in on the “red zones,” select that particular box, and discover the instructional resources that can help build the gap. The Skills Diagnostic Report is a powerful tool for differentiating instruction.  The Report:

1. Shows the State Standards relevant to the user (TEKS in Texas, BEST in Florida, Common Core in CCSS states, and so on);

2. Morphs mirror the district-chosen curriculum (e.g., Amplify CKLA, McGraw-Hill Wonders).

3. It bases skill mastery on actual, specific observation of a student’s reading. If the Diagnostic Report shows the “TH Digraph” skill as red, the student has struggled to read the “TH” digraph.

Class Progress Report Questions: Which students in my class are doing okay, and which should I be worried about? How have my students changed since the last assessment window? The Class Progress Report is the at-a-glance way for teachers to evaluate Screener Results. The report tells the teacher where the student stands, highlights whether an intervention is needed, and makes it easy to see how much growth has occurred since the last screening window.

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