2nd-5th Grade Reading Present Levels & Assessments

A key part of a student’s  reading present levels is the DRA, ARI, or whatever other levelled reading assessment your district uses. Note that these are not included in our assessment packet, but baselines and tips are included below!

• The DRA is a pretty popular levelled reading assessment. At the lower levels, students read an entire book to you and then answer written questions. You come up with a level like 18 that they are reading at based on their accuracy, fluency, and comprehension.
• The ARI is a short cut alternative. It offers only one passage per grade level and they are very brief, so it is a very rough assessment.
• There are also a variety of other assessments used in district assessment. General education teachers are often required to give these assessments before report card periods and you can earn serious site credit by doing them for the teachers– and get an informal assessment in too!

Need assessment tools or help turning assessments into strong IEPs? The IEP Success Kit has comprehensive (minus a DRA!) reading, writing, and mathematics assessments for annual IEP and progress monitoring reports!

• Tip 1: Some students are reluctant writers. The upper levels of the DRA have a LOT of writing for the comprehension questions. Your goal is to know what they understand, not what they can write. Typing, voice dictation programs, or even just having them answer the questions orally can all help.

• Tip 2: Some students have a large split between comprehension and decoding. For those students, you can read the DRA stories and then ask the student the questions. That or another grade level comprehension assessment (that you read or have a  computer read) can help you get a sense of their comprehension skills independent of decoding.

Zahara is reading words on a list and in stories at a mid-first grade level  (DRA 12 advanced decoding, DRA 14 intervention decoding). She needed multiple prompts and extra time to give a complete retell of a DRA 12 story that she read. Given time, she was able to tell almost all the important details from the story. Her initial retell had the main ideas of the story but limited details and she needed prompts to add on. 

What type of words can a student read? If you use a DRA-type assessment, you can get a sense of what grade level words a student can decode, but that doesn’t help you decide on phonics interventions and placements. Decoding assessments can fill that gap!

• Many school sites have adopted phonics programs. If yours is one of those, you are in luck! Almost all of those programs include a high-quality decoding assessment. While the programs expect you to use that assessment just for program placement, you can often pull enough information from it to inform an IEP. Note that the assessments were not designed for IEPs (or to save you time!), so you might need to do a bit of work to pull helpful IEP information from them!

Need assessment tools or help turning assessments into strong IEPs? The IEP Success Kit has comprehensive (minus a DRA!) reading, writing, and mathematics assessments for annual IEP and progress monitoring reports!

• 80% on a section is considered proficient– I only report on accuracy until that threshold.

• Stop the assessment if a student is getting less than 20% right on a section– there is no point in torturing yourself or a student!
• I typically only report on a student’s percentage of accuracy within a section but you can also include example words. If you see interesting patterns, report on those. For example, in digraphs a student might get all of the “th” ones right and one of the others, which is worth reporting. Or a student might get all of the real words but miss nonsense words– or the single syllable but not the two. If it is interesting and could help shape an intervention, report on it!

Student 1:

Ji can read CVC words with 50% accuracy. He can read words with digraphs with under 10% accuracy and needs teacher support to read words with other letter patterns.

Student 2:

Janna is proficient at reading CVC words as well as words with consonant digraphs, blends, and long vowels. She can read words with “r” controlled vowels with 67% accuracy and words with vowel diphthongs with 53% accuracy.

For some students, it is helpful to report the number of words they can read accurately per minute at a given grade level. Fluency materials are not in the assessment packet because my groups typically included a fluency warm up (like Read Naturally) and I just used the data from that for the IEP.

• If you are are using a fluency program or intervention, just report on that data in the IEP. The big ones I have used for fluency are Read Naturally, Six Minute Solution, and the fluency passages from Reading A-Z. 
• Some levelled reading assessments like the DRA also include a fluency component– you are supposed to time a student reading one page. If your assessment includes that information, just put it in the IEP.

Need assessment tools or help turning assessments into strong IEPs? The IEP Success Kit has comprehensive (minus a DRA!) reading, writing, and mathematics assessments for annual IEP and progress monitoring reports!

• Standards of how many words per minute is considered fluent vary by grade level. If a student is reading at a fifth grade level, you are typically looking to see them read at least 80wpm. If they are reading at a first grade level, you might be okay with 30wpm. Because the words per minute you are looking for vary so much, you need to include both how many words per minute the student read and whether that was fluent for  the text according to the assessment.

• You want to assess students at the grade level where they are most fluent or right above that. When I see an IEP that says a student can read 30wpm on a 5th grade text, I get frustrated. That student is not anywhere near fluent at a 5th grade level. They probably should be working on fluency on about a 3rd grade text– telling me about their wpm on a fifth grade text is just telling me how much they are failing. I want to know where I should start them in my fluency group!

Zannia is a fast, fluent reader on grade level texts. She can read a fifth grade passage at 93 words per minute with 95% accuracy.

Assessments like the DRA give you some information about a student’s reading comprehension, but often you need more to really inform your IEP goals. What do you notice in group? What else can you say about where a student is strong or needs support?

Are you using EasyCBM? ReadWorks? Lexia? Any of those types of program can help you assess students’ reading comprehension.

• Use any online tools that you are using, from Lexia to EasyCBM to give you data on the types of questions the student can answer and the types of texts that they are stronger on.
• Take notes as you talk with the student about what they are reading– those notes are great data!
• Take the results of multiple choice assessments with a grain of salt– students guess a lot. Your notes are often much more useful!

Need assessment tools or help turning assessments into strong IEPs? The IEP Success Kit has comprehensive (minus a DRA!) reading, writing, and mathematics assessments for annual IEP and progress monitoring reports!

• You can read these stories to a student and write the answers for them. After all, these stories are written to assess comprehension skills, not decoding or writing skills. The term “author’s bias” is new to a lot of students so explain it if you need to.

• Each story focuses on a different area of comprehension. The Kelly and Mindy story assesses how well students can answer “wh” questions about a story. The turtle story assesses literal comprehension focusing on story elements– beginning, middle, end, and problem/solution. Metamorphisis moves to non-fiction with main idea and details. Mr.Kirk goes back to fiction and assesses character knowledge and inferencing. Coal moves to author’s bias and details while the freezing day story goes back to inferencing. The final story looks at higher level fiction comprehension skills including theme, lessons, and changes in a character.

Student 1:

Kassandra has good literal comprehension of texts. After a reading a short fiction story, Kassandra is good at answering “wh” questions about a story. She can tell the problem in a story as well as what happens in the beginning, middle, and end of the story but she needs support to tell how the problem is solved. She can describe a character as well, but needs support with higher level comprehension including making inferences and discussing the theme of the story. After reading short non-fiction passages, Kassandra was strong at telling details from the passages, but she needed support with higher level comprehension like finding the main idea of the passage.

Student 2:

Jacob has good literal comprehension of short passages. He was able to answer “wh” questions about a story and tell what happened in the story, including what the problem/solution was. He is able to describe characters and how they feel about each other and connect his thinking to the text through evidence.  Jacob can also tell what a character learns during the story. He needs support with higher level comprehension skills like making inferences and identifying a theme in a story. His understanding of non-fiction texts is emerging. He needs support to find the main idea of a non-fiction passage but is able to find details from the story.