easyCBM and literacy
For reading, there are skill sets that stair-step up in difficulty. Beginning with the fundamentals of reading there is Letter Names, Phoneme Segmenting, and Letter Sounds. Progressing up in difficulty are the harder skills of Word Reading Fluency, Passage Reading Fluency, then Basic and Proficient Reading Comprehensi. You are not only trying to determine where a student's knowledge lies but also determine 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 become less appropriate as students become more adept at actually reading).
Letter Names Fluency – this assessment gives information about students’ ability in naming the letters, but is not as predictive of later reading skill as Letter Sounds Fluency.
Letter Sounds Fluency – this assessment is the most highly predictive skill of later reading proficiency available at Kindergarten. It measures students’ ability to produce the sounds associated with letters and letter digraphs.
Word Reading Fluency – this assessment is one of the two measures of Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) available in the easyCBM system. It 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 - this assessment is 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.
Vocabulary (Deluxe only) - this assessment tests students' knowledge of vocabulary in context. Words and phrases, embedded in sentences, are presented to the students, and they are asked to select the answer option that best represents the meaning of the target words/phrases. Some of the words are from grade-level lists of content words, others are idiomatic expressions, and still others are examples of metaphorical language.
Basic Reading (Deluxe only) - this assessment is designed for students who are persistently struggling with reading comprehension and are consistently low-performing on the Proficient Reading measures relative to their peers. They are intended to provide educators with accessible measures to assess students’ reading comprehension.
The Basic Reading measures include three sub-tests, Short Literary Text, Informational Text, and Read to Perform a Task organized together into a comprehensive reading comprehension assessment.
One item to note, while grade 2 is where the Proficient Reading measures start, there are no grade 2 Basic Reading measures. That is because the Proficient Reading measures at grade 2 are already much simpler than the Proficient Reading measures at the other grades (the passages are approximately 700 words long rather than 1500 to 1800, there are only 12 questions rather than 20, and have only literal and inferential questions rather than literal, inferential, and evaluative).
Proficient Reading - this assessment was developed to include both benchmark/ creening and progress monitoring assessments. Ideally, all students, Grade 2-8, would be screened using the Proficient Reading measures, with persistently struggling/low-performing students then screened and progress-monitored with the Basic Reading assessments. Proficient Reading progress-monitoring measures would thus be used with those students who are much closer to meeting grade-level reading comprehension expectations.