easyCBM and literacy
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’ ability 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 - these 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.
Vocabulary (Deluxe only) - these tests assess 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) - the measures are 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 there are only literal and inferential questions rather than literal, inferential, and evaluative).
Proficient Reading - these assessments were developed to include both benchmark / screening 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.