Fountas and Pinnell Reading Levels

Our school uses Fountas and Pinnell Reading Levels. How/where could I input the students' reading levels, so that I can track their progress? (For example, a student is at level H and in a month moves up to level J)?

There is no chart or table in easyCBM that will provide, or spell out, the specific growth for each student. This is mainly because each student is different in his or her growth needs. You can, however, determine how much student growth you will need to see per week depending on what score/percentile the student is at in relation to the closest benchmark scores in the Progress Monitoring Scoring Guidelines and when you want each student to attain their 50th percentile score. The Progress Monitoring Scoring Guidelines can be found by either logging in to your account or going to the http://easycbm.com website and logging in to a demo account. Next go to the “Reports” section, and in the upper right-hand corner the is a downloadable pdf file called Progress Monitoring Scoring Guidelines.

So the steps you need to help assess a student is to first determine if they need progress monitoring, by administering a progress monitoring measure. Next compare your student’s score with those on the Progress Monitoring Scoring Guidelines. Choose the score closest to the time of year your student took the test. Then determine the number of weeks in between the current time and the time the student’s benchmark goal should be attained (fall, winter, or spring).

The way to figure out what percentile rank ‘goes with’ a particular score in the Progress Monitor Scoring Guidelines is to, (a) find the measure you are interested in, (b) find the grade you are interested in, (c) find the “benchmark” season you are interested in, (d) find the “score” you are interested in (4th column in) or the “Percentile” you are interested in and then, (e) look up the ‘Percentile” (if you were trying to figure out what specific percentile rank goes with a particular score) or (f) look up the ‘Score’ (if you were trying to figure out what specific score goes with a particular percentile rank).

Now compare the benchmark percentile score with your student’s progress monitoring score and then decide when you want to achieve the student’s attainment of a 50th percentile score. You will need to work with each student’s assessment scores and then cross-reference them with the 50th percentile scores on the Progress Monitoring Scoring Guidelines. Relatively speaking you will need to count the number of weeks the students are in school (from a calendar) and related the Fall, Winter, and Spring benchmark scores closest to when students they took their initial test. General benchmark dates for easyCBM are as follows: Fall – Sept 15th, Winter – Jan 15th, and Spring – May 15th. An example of how to assess a student’s weekly growth is listed below.

So say you have a 6th grade student who took a Passage Reading Fluency test on October 30th and received a score of 100. By looking at the Progress Monitoring Scoring Guidelines, and comparing their score to other 6th graders at that time of year, he/she should have a 50th percentile score of 137. So the winter goal for your student would be 154 words/min. and the spring goal would be 163 words/min. In other words your student will have to score 54 words/min. better by Jan. 15th or 63 words/min. better by May 15th in order to reach their on grade level goal in the 50th percentile.

For planning a strategy of improvement for your student, you will need to consider when you want them to reach their goal. If by taking their benchmark test on October 30th you want your student to reach their winter benchmark goal of 154 wpm (by Jan. 15th), you have 8 weeks for them to improve 54 wpm, or 6.75 wpm per week. If you are looking for a spring benchmark goal of 163 wpm (by May 15th), in which you have 23 weeks to see a 63 wpm improvement, your student will need to improve by 2.7 wpm per week.

For a student not functioning at their grade level, you can assess them at different grades but the goal will always be to get them back on their expected grade level as soon as possible and at the 50th percentile.