What is the skill list for brenchmark and progress monitoring measures?
READING
For reading, the skill sets stair-step up in difficulty beginning with the fundamentals of reading: Letter Names, Phoneme Segmenting, Letter Sounds, and progressing up to the more difficult skills of Word Reading Fluency, Passage Reading Fluency, then Basic and Proficient Reading Comprehension. Students might perform well on the basic reading skills assessments written for higher grades but might need to drop down to lower grades on the more difficult skill sets. You are not only trying to determine where their knowledge lies but also their ability to read and understand words and sentences.
Phoneme Segmenting Fluency – this assessment is generally most appropriate for students whose instruction is focused on learning to differentiate between different sound units (phonemes and becomes less appropriate as students become more adept at actually reading).
Letter Names Fluency – this assessment gives information about students’ automaticity in naming the letters but is not as predictive of later reading skill as Letter Sounds Fluency.
Letter Sounds Fluency – the most highly predictive of later reading proficiency of all the measures available at Kindergarten. It measures students’ ability to produce the sounds associated with letters and letter digraphs.
Word Reading Fluency – this is one of the two measures of Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) available in the easyCBM system. This assessment is most appropriate to use with students who are still reading individual words, one at a time, rather than ‘clusters’ of words together. Once students have begun to ‘chunk’ words together, the WRF measure begins to be too easy for them. For most students in Kindergarten, and many First Graders, this is the most appropriate oral reading fluency test to use.
Passage Reading Fluency. The Passage Reading Fluency tests are offered starting with Grade 1. If you need easier-access oral reading fluency measures, you can use the WRF measures from Kindergarten. WRF and PRF have a correlation of right around .98 with one another — they are assessing the same construct (oral reading fluency), just in a slightly different format.
To find out what questions correspond to a particular type of comprehension, you will need to login to your account and go to the Reports section.
Once your students have completed a Proficient Reading assessment, go to the Reports tab and select “Group”. Then, click on the Proficient Reading test your students have taken. The window will open, extending beyond view on the bottom of the screen. Scroll down the page and you will see “item analysis” report, which is where each specific type of comprehension item measures a different category:
Literal Comprehension = information can be found directly in the text.
Inferential Comprehension = information that must be ‘inferred’ from more than one place in the text.
Evaluative Comprehension = information that must be pulled from more than one place in the text and then ‘filtered’ through a lens of ‘which is most correct, given the details and nuances in the text.
To find out what questions your students got correct or incorrect, scroll down to the bottom of the page to the “Students” section. There, to the right of each student name, you can click on “View Test” to access the test the student completed. You will be able to view the correct response for each question as well as the incorrect response the student chose.
MATH
In easyCBM we don’t have math probes targeting specific math skills because both national and state standards have moved away from skill-based standards (e.g., application, computation, problem-solving), and instead embed those skills across grade-level math domains (e.g., geometry, measurement, etc.).
Here is what our easyCBM recommendation would be:
1. If the student is functioning close to grade-level expectations (i.e., based on benchmarking and other classroom-based data/information) then the Proficient Math probes would likely be most appropriate. They are longer (25-30 problems) and more difficult than the Basic Math measures, and include applications of math reasoning and multiple problem-solving items on most probes.
2. If the student is functioning below his/her enrolled grade-level expectations (below 6th grade?), then one of the Basic Math short probes (just 16 test items) is likely more appropriate — at Grade 6, the Algebra probes have the most problem solving/applied reasoning type problems in them.
3. If the student is far below grade-level expectations, we suggest working with the teacher/school psychologist, etc. to actually look at the math problems on the different math measures available and then select the measure type that best matches what the student is being taught. By looking at the actual test items, which are similar in style across each of the ten test forms/and within each measure type can match what the student is being taught (generally, but more importantly, during intervention support), to the most appropriate measure(s). If unsure which one is most suitable for a given student, benchmark performance might help identify areas/problem types of weakness.