The RAN measure provides additional information on students’ skills in the area of rapid automatized naming, which is considered a measure of phonological processing, specifically the retrieval of phonological information. This measure is available for benchmarking three times a year from kindergarten through third grade. 

Using a teacher-student shared screen, the teacher discreetly marks student responses as the student names the repeated numbers accurately and rapidly out loud. RAN is a timed measure, and the student score is the total time in seconds that the student took to complete all the items in the task, regardless of correctness of the response. 

While teachers can indicate whether students answer each item correctly or incorrectly, the number of correct and incorrect responses is not factored into the final score. When students respond incorrectly, it impacts their processing of the information, resulting in a longer time to name the item and a higher overall time to complete the task (the final score). The RAN assessment takes approximately 1-2 minutes to complete.

The Oral Language measure identifies students who struggle with the language structures commonly found in early reading texts. This observational screening consists of 21 sentences of increasing syntactic complexity. Students are asked to repeat the sentences verbatim while the assessor notes errors, including substitutions, repetitions, insertions, self-corrections, and omissions. This measure is available for benchmarking three times a year from kindergarten through second grade. The Oral Language assessment takes approximately 5 minutes to administer. 

A different set of sentences is administered for each assessment window (beginning, middle, and end of year). Each set of 21 sentences comprises seven levels of syntactic complexity, with three sentences at each level. Two shorter sentences reflect the essential structures of the level, and one longer sentence includes additional elements, such as prepositional phrases or noun clauses. Vocabulary is intentionally simple to target syntactic knowledge without added semantic challenge. 

Research supports the validity of sentence repetition as a screener of oral language receptive knowledge in preschool and early elementary students (Clay, 1971; Gentile, 2000; Gardner et al., 2006; Romeo et al., 2008). The sentences in this assessment are sufficiently long to exceed the limitations of working memory, requiring students to process and chunk the information into meaningful parts in order to successfully repeat the sentences (Gentile, 2000). This task can reveal the types of grammatical structures students can comprehend, even if they are unable to spontaneously produce those structures (Clay, 1971), making it relevant to planning instruction for students developing reading comprehension skills.