Assessments

ACADIENCE

Acadience is a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of early literacy skills from kindergarten through sixth grade. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of early literacy and early reading skills.

These assessments are comprised of seven measures to function as indicators of phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency with connected text, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Acadience was designed for use in identifying children experiencing difficulty in the acquisition of basic early literacy skills in order to provide support early and prevent the occurrence of later reading difficulties.

Local assessments are administered school-wide three times per year: September, January, and May. Dependent upon individual student needs, progress monitoring is administered throughout the school year.




DIAGNOSTIC DECODING SURVEY

Diagnostic Decoding Surveys are an easy and efficient way to determine when students are having word-level reading difficulties impairing their comprehension.

The Beginning Decoding Survey (DDS) assesses how well students are reading words they should have mastered by the end of first grade:

  • High-frequency words

  • Single syllable words with short vowels, digraphs, and two-sound blends

The Advanced Decoding Survey (DDS) assesses the decoding skills students should have mastered by the end of third grade:

  • Single syllable words with short vowels and more advanced phonics patterns (e.g. trigraphs, three-sound blends)

  • Single syllable words with advanced vowel patterns

  • Multisyllable words (real and nonsense)

Local assessments are administered school-wide three times per year: September, January, and May. Dependent upon individual student needs, progress monitoring is administered throughout the school year.



DAZE

Daze is a group-administered measure of reading comprehension. Students are asked to read a passage silently. In the passage, every seventh word (approximately) is blank, with a maze of options (i.e., three possible word choices for the blank). One of the words in the maze is always correct, and the other two are incorrect. Daze requires students to choose the correct word as they read the passage. Students are given three minutes to work on this task. The score is the number of correct words circled minus the number of incorrect words circled.

Local assessments are administered school-wide three times per year: September, January, and May. Dependent upon individual student needs, progress monitoring is administered throughout the school year.