LETRS Unit 1: Session 8 Already Graded
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Outcome assessments
Outcome assessments assess the overall effectiveness of instruction given to a large student
population—for example, all students within a state. These high-stakes, summative reading
assessments are usually administered at the end of grade 3 or 4. Because they are often normed,
they can show how an individual is doing relative to norms and help in comparing groups.
Screening measures
Screening measures help predict which students are at risk for reading failure and how they are
likely to perform on outcome assessments by measuring their performance against established
benchmarks. Screening measures, such as Acadience® Reading K–6 or AIMSweb®, focus on
foundational skills and are administered several times a year in the early grades. Because they are
brief, low-cost measures that provide extremely useful information, they are highly efficient.
Diagnostic surveys
Diagnostic surveys inform teachers’ work with at-risk readers. This category includes informal
diagnostics teachers use to assess students’ academic knowledge or skills in a particular area (e.g.,
a developmental spelling inventory or handwriting sample), as well as formal, specialized testing
used to determine whether a student fits the criteria for a specific developmental disorder (e.g., an
assessment to determine whether and where a child falls on the autism spectrum).
Progress-monitoring tests
Progress-monitoring tests inform instruction by telling how well instruction is working—that is,
how at-risk students are responding to instruction. These formative assessments, typically
