1. Imagine It!
Assessment

2. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
Standardized classroom assessment whereby students’ overall competence is measured.
The testing methods and content of general outcome measurement remain constant over the course of the academic year.
Each test is of equivalent difficulty and represents competence in the entire school year’s curriculum.

3. Assessment The assessment system of Imagine It! consists of :
Screening
Progress monitoring
Diagnosis

4. Imagine It! Formal Assessment System
Benchmark Assessments
For all students
Given regularly throughout the year
Lesson Assessments
Weekly
Progress monitoring and diagnostic

5. Benchmark Assessments
Administrated at the beginning of the year for screening.
Administrated after every unit to show student mastery of the curriculum and identify students at risk for failure.
Benchmark test assess:(depending on grade level)
Phonics
High-frequency word recognition
Vocabulary
Spelling
Grammar, usage and mechanics
Comprehension
Fluency

6. Benchmark Assessment Unit Cutoffs
Schedule: 1 at the start of the year for screening and then 1 after every unit.
Benchmark Skills
Phonics
High-Frequency Word Recognition
Grammar, Usage and Mechanics
Spelling
Comprehension
Vocabulary
Oral Fluency Passage Reading

7. Lesson Assessment Lesson Assessments are given weekly. Lesson Skills
Phonics
Grammar, Usage and Mechanics
Comprehension
Selection Vocabulary
Writing
Oral Fluency
Spelling

8. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
Two basic approaches to general outcome measurement:
Curriculum-Sampling Approach
Skills that constitute the annual curriculum are specified
A set of procedures for measuring each skill
The proportion of each item type is determined so that each test samples the various skills to reflect the relative importance of each skill
Strand
# Items
Total Weight
Comprehension 20 40
Vocabulary 10 30
Grammar, Usage, Mechanics
Spelling

9. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
Each alternate form of the test is created the same way.
The difficulty and content of the test remain constant and we expect the student’s scores to gradually increase over the course of the year.
Incorporated into the Benchmark Assessments with the 100-point Skills Battery.

10. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
The Performance Indicator Approach
A single task for measurement that is correlated with the various skills addressed in the annual curriculum.
The content and difficulty of the task remains constant across the school year although the testing material differs across alternate forms of the test.
Example- passage reading fluency
Although this is a direct measure of oral reading fluency, it also functions well as an indicator of a student’s overall reading competence.

11. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
Formal assessment is addressed in the form of Benchmark Assessments and Lesson Assessments
The Benchmark and Lesson Assessments incorporate the performance indicator approach with their Fluency Assessments

12. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
Measures have been validated to accurately reflect overall reading competence and those measures differ by grade level.
Kindergarten
Phoneme segmentation- The examiner says a word, the student says its constituent sounds
Rapid letter naming- The examiner presents a page of lower- and upper-case letters randomly ordered- students says as many as they can in one minute
Letter-sound fluency- The examiner presents a page with lower- and upper-case letters randomly ordered, this time the student says sounds for one minute

13. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
First Grade
Combining nonsense word fluency and passage reading- Students begin with nonsense word fluency and move to the more difficult passage fluency where students are presented with grade-level text and they read aloud for one minute.
Word identification fluency- Students read as many words as possible in one minute.
The advantage of nonsense word fluency is that it maps onto beginning decoding instruction.
The downside of the nonsense word fluency/passage reading fluency combination is that getting a good picture of development over the course of first grade is problematic because teachers cannot compare scores collected in the first half of the year.

14. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
Second - Fourth Grade
Passage reading fluency measure provides the strongest source of information on reading development as a form of performance indicator general outcome measurement.
Each week one test is administered with the student reading aloud from a different but equivalent passage for one minute.
The examiner counts the number of words read correctly within the one-minute time frame.
The reliability,validity, and instructional utility of this simple measure have been demonstrated repeatedly.

15. Assessment General Outcome Measurement
Fifth- Sixth Grade
Research indicates that the validity of the passage reading fluency performance indicator begins to decrease somewhere around Grade 5.
So, beginning in the 5th grade (or in Grade 4 for high-performing schools), teachers should consider using a different measure that more directly taps comprehension.
One alternative for the higher grades is maze fluency. With maze fluency students are presented with a passage from which approximately every seventh word has been deleted and replaced with three possible replacements, only one of which is semantically tenable.
Demonstrates strong reliability and validity and models reading development beginning at Grade 4 and continuing through grade 8.

16. Assessment 3 Types of Formal Classroom Assessment
Screening
Progress monitoring
Diagnosis

17. Assessment Screening
Screening is the process of measuring all students in a class to identify the subset of students who, without special attention, are in danger of scoring poorly on the end-of-year high-stakes tests and long-term reading failure.

18. Assessment Screening
Students are identified as having potential problems early.
Teachers can then allocate special attention to these students as quickly as possible. (Catch-up Time)
Once a screening assessment has been selected, a cut-point is determined.
Performing below the cut-point signals the teacher to pay extra attention to this student.
When periodic screening is used, the cut-point on each subsequent screening gradually increases.

19. Assessment Progress Monitoring
SRA Imagine It! uses the term progress monitoring to refer to specifically systematic formal assessments in which students are assessed on a regular basis.
Teachers can use results from progress monitoring:
To formulate decision about how to make classroom-level instruction more responsive to individual student needs
To determine whether a student is responding adequately to the instructional program
For students who are unresponsive to validated or researched-based instructional program, to inductively design individualized instructional plans

20. Assessment Progress Monitoring
In most reading programs, progress monitoring is accomplished via mastery measurement. SRA Imagine It! does not use mastery measurement.
With mastery measurement, teachers assess mastery of a sequence of skills.
Most basal reading assessments provide unit test to assess mastery of skills addressed in each unit. Nevertheless, research indicates that few classroom teachers adhere to mastery rules, based on those tests, for advancing students to new instructional content.
High-stakes tests do not rely on single-skill measurement.

21. Assessment Progress Monitoring
Benchmark Assessments- 6 or 7 administered through out year
Student will encounter 5 lesson assessments before the next Benchmark assessment which will allow the teacher to use the information to reinforce the opinion of a student’s at-risk status or it can provide data of growth and greater comfort within instructional strands.
Not all students receive fluency progress monitoring. Weekly progress monitoring for those students who do can help teachers gain insight about the effectiveness of their attempts at remediation for these at-risk students.
Once a student is designated as at risk they should receive weekly progress monitoring for the remainder of the year even if the student scores above the risk cut-point on a subsequent screening.

22. Assessment Diagnosis
Diagnosis means assessment that describes a student’s strengths and weaknesses with respect to skills or strategies.
Goal is to identify productive targets for instruction
A curriculum-sampling approach to general outcome measurements provides teachers with a strong basis for describing students’ strengths and weaknesses in the curriculum because all the skills embedded in the annual curriculum are assessed on each testing occasion

23. Assessment Diagnosis
Because each of the segments of the Benchmark Assessments provide a separate score in each of the strands of the curriculum, they can be used to identify the specific curriculum areas that are strengths or weaknesses for a student or across a classroom.
If students score below the cutoff for any Benchmark Assessment, use one or more of the following options to help students get back on track:
Re-teach
Intervention
Workshop
Leveled Readers

24. Assessment Benchmark Assessments
Benchmark Assessments show how students’ knowledge of essential skills grows over the course of the year as these benchmarks are periodically administered. Each Benchmark Assessment is of equivalent difficulty, content covered, and question formats and each samples the entire year’s curriculum.

25. Assessment Benchmark Assessments
At each grade level there are periodic Benchmark Assessments.
Kindergarten and grade assessments
Grades assessments
Assessments are timed
One assessment is administered at the beginning of the year and then one after each unit the remainder of the year.

26. Assessment Benchmark Assessments
The specific test items vary from assessment to assessment.
Rising test scores reflect increased student competence in the curriculum.
These assessments differ from traditional assessments that:
cover only the material in the most recently taught unit
become increasingly difficult over the course of a school year

27. Assessment Benchmark Assessments
Benchmark Assessments include the following components:
100- Point Skills Battery- Students answer questions relating to comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, usage, and mechanics, spelling, phonics, and phonemic-phonological awareness. Each strand has been assigned a weight in accordance with its importance in the curriculum to reach the total of 100 points.
Fluency Assessment- A general overall indicator of a student’s reading ability.
Writing Assessment- Grades 2-6 , a writing assessment is included with the first, fourth, and seventh Benchmark Assessments. These prompts are similar to the type of prompt found in high-stakes tests.

28. Assessment Benchmark Assessments
At the beginning of the year; and then periodically throughout the year, any student who falls below the cutoff score on the 100-Point Skills Battery, Fluency Assessment, and Expository Writing Assessment should be considered for intervention. That student’s progress should be closely monitored through weekly fluency assessments.

29. Assessment Lesson Assessments
Lesson Assessments at the end of each lesson assess students’ understanding of the instructional content and the literature in each lesson. They cover the most important skills featured in the lesson of a given unit-skills that are closely related to reading success and are typically in state and national standards.

30. Assessment Lesson Assessments
These assessments will help you determine how well students are grasping the skills and concepts as they are taught and will help inform you about any additional instruction they might need.

31. Assessment Lesson Assessments
As students complete each lesson, they will be assessed on their understanding of the instructional content and the literature in each lesson.
The results of the assessments will then be used to inform subsequent instruction.
The Lesson Assessments are in a structure similar to that of the Benchmark Assessments in terms of assessments sections that equal 100-points, a fluency assessment, and a writing assessment.

32. Assessment Informal Assessment Opportunities
Informal Assessment throughout the Teacher’s Edition provides tips for informal assessment on a daily basis for each part of the lesson. These include;
decoding skills
vocabulary
comprehension
grammar- usage, and mechanic skills
listening, speaking, viewing
handwriting skills.

33. Assessment
Because a one time-screening assessment, especially at kindergarten and first grade, typically makes too many errors of these types, SRA suggest that the initial screening assessment constitute only the first step in the process designating risk status.