C. Measures of Reading Ability
Seven measures of reading skill were administered at the beginning and end of the school year to assess student progress in learning to read. As outlined below, these measures of reading skills assessed phonemic decoding, word reading accuracy, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension.
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Phonemic Decoding
- Word Attack (WA) subtest from the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised (WRMT-R)
- Phonemic Decoding Efficiency (PDE) subtest from the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE)
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Word Reading Accuracy and Fluency
- Word Identification (WI) subtest from the WRMT-R
- Sight Word Efficiency (SWE) subtest from the TOWRE
- Oral Reading Fluency subtest from Edformation, Inc. The text of this report refers to the reading passages as "Aimsweb" passages, which is the term used broadly in the reading practice community.
- Passage Comprehension (PC) subtest from the WRMT-R
- Passage Comprehension from the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE)
For all tests except the Aimsweb passages, the analysis uses grade-normalized standard scores, which indicate where a student falls within the overall distribution of reading ability among students in the same grade. Scores above 100 indicate above-average performance; scores below 100 indicate below-average performance. In the population of students across the country at all levels of reading ability, standard scores are constructed to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, implying that approximately 70 percent of all students' scores will fall between 85 and 115 and that approximately 95 percent of all students' scores will fall between 70 and 130. For the Aimsweb passages, the score used in this analysis is the median correct words per minute from three grade-level passages.