Local Assessment Measures

Curriculum Based Measures provide assessment evidence that indicates if students have achieved the desired results of instruction/teaching and learning. Designing and implementing CBMs sharpens and focuses teaching. Using a wide range of assessments from performance tasks to traditional quizzes, tests, observations, work samples, collaborative tasks, and other measures it is possible to determine what students know and can do. When someone understands, they

• Can explain concepts, principles, and processes by putting it their own words, teaching it to others, justifying their answers, and showing their reasoning.
• Can interpret by making sense of data, text, and experience through images, analogies, stories, and models.
• Can apply by effectively using and adapting what they know in new and complex contexts.
• Demonstrate perspective by seeing the big picture and recognizing different points of view.
• Display empathy by perceiving sensitively and walking in someone else’s shoes.
• Have self-knowledge by showing meta-cognitive awareness, using productive habits of mind, and reflecting on the meaning of the learning and experience.

Six Facets of Understanding

Using the assessment results, the teacher can guide instruction to benefit the students’ learning. Regardless of the form, the assessment is designed to sharpen the instructional focus, and promote efficient learning.

DIBELS ® (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of literacy skills. They are designed to be short fluency measures that can be used to regularly detect risk and monitor the development of early literacy and early reading skills in kindergarten through eighth grade.

DIBELS was developed to measure recognized and empirically validated skills related to general reading outcomes. Each subtest has been thoroughly researched and demonstrated to be a reliable and valid indicator of early literacy development. 

The DIBELS literacy assessment is given in grades kindergarten through seven.

Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®), created by Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™), is a computer adaptive test, which means every student gets a unique set of test questions based on responses to previous questions. As the student answers correctly, questions get harder. If the student answers incorrectly, the questions get easier. By the end of the test, most students will answer about half the questions correctly.

The assessment is designed to measure a student’s achievement level during the fall, winter, and spring of the school year and compute growth. Teachers can see the progress of individual students and of their class as a whole. Students with similar MAP scores are generally ready for instruction in similar skills and topics. MAP also provides data around the typical growth for students who are in the same grade, subject, and have the same starting achievement level. This data is often used to help students set goals and understand what they need to learn to achieve their goals.

MAP is an assessment that focuses on growth over time and should be interpreted with a growth lens considering at least three data points. Your child’s MAP test results will be reported in RIT scores. This is a different type of score than a typical test that provides a percentage correct. It is also different from many tests that provide results based on your child’s score compared to others in his or her grade. Instead, the RIT score is an equal-interval scale, like feet and inches, that is independent of grade level. The RIT is not a measure of mastery or a grade, rather it provides information about what a student is ready to learn. As a result, we can easily measure growth in learning. This type of score increases the value of the tests as a tool to improve student learning because it enables teachers to recognize where to focus attention for your child’s learning.

MAP is given in grades K-8 for math, grades 2-8 for reading and 6-8 for language.

For additional information about MAP, please refer to the Parent Toolkit.

Running Records allow teachers to see what children do as readers as it is happening. A running record provides helpful information about a child’s fluency, accuracy, and literal and inferential comprehension of a text. Teachers use that information to support a child’s reading growth. The goal of a running record is, first, to see how the student is using the strategies taught in class, and second, to find out if the student is ready to advance a reading level.

Knowing more about the child’s current control of levels of texts can also help you make sure you have lots of books on hand that are well matched for this reader - books that are just at the outside edge of the child’s zone of proximal development. It also helps you understand the next steps with a child in terms of phonics, fluency, and comprehension. Analyzing running records helps teachers answer questions such as:

• What are your readers’ strengths?
• What types of supports and scaffolds do students need?
• What conferences and small groups will support your students to grow as readers?

Running Records help teachers support a reader at the next level, so that across the year kids are steadily moving up levels of text complexity. Children grow as readers when they are reading books they understand. But we also know that kids will grow as readers in uneven spurts, and they may be ready to or want to reach for harder books, so we support kids' reading across a band of text levels.

Use the links below for Running Record Reading Goals by grade:

• Running Record Reading Goals - 1st Grade
• Running Record Reading Goals - 2nd Grade
• Running Record Reading Goals - 3rd Grade
• Running Record Reading Goals - 4th Grade
• Running Record Reading Goals - 5th Grade

*In the 2021-2022 school year SASD aligned to the most current published benchmark scores for grades K-5. Benchmarks let us know when there is trouble so that we can move and best support all students. The shift of changing benchmarks will require necessary time to adjust to new expectations in the reading levels at each grade.

A child’s reading level involves many skills (choosing books wisely, writing about reading, engaging in literary conversation, supporting your ideas about characters and themes with evidence from the text, making connections across texts, and more). It is important for both students and families to have feedback on those skills. A child may, for instance, currently read below grade level, but be working hard and making progress on grade level reading skills and standards. It is important for families and caregivers to know children’s current reading levels, both so they are aware of areas of strengths and concerns and can support the child in access to books and time to read, and so adults in and out of school can support kids in finding books at their level.