Inside the Reading Assistant Benchmark Assessment

• Benchmark Assessment Tasks
• Sample Assessment Task Videos

Benchmark Assessment Tasks

The Benchmark Assessment consists of a Dyslexia Screener and an Oral Reading Fluency passage with comprehension questions. Most schools administer the assessment three times per year: at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the year.

The Benchmark Assessment includes the following tasks:

• Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN): Rapid automized naming requires the student to identify and articulate the elements of a long list. Processing speed and accuracy are measured.

• Letter Naming and Letter Sounds: The student is shown a letter and asked to identify it and produce the associated sound. For vowels, several alternatives are accepted.

• Word Decoding: The student is shown the text of words, one at a time. The student must read the word.

• Phonological Awareness Tasks

  • Phoneme Segmentation: Students are asked to break a word into its individual phonemes (sounds) and say them one at a time. The task begins with a modeled example. Students are then prompted with target words and must segment the sounds in sequence.

  • Blending: A video is provided of a person slowly articulating each phoneme in a word. The students must blend the sounds and identify the complete word accurately.

  • Phonological Elision/Deletion: Students are given a word and asked to say it without a specific part of the word (syllable or phoneme).

• Phonological Working Memory: This task assesses a student’s ability to hear and accurately repeat made-up words, measuring how well they temporarily store and manipulate unfamiliar phonological information.

• Pseudoword Identification: This task requires the student to read pseudowords (nonsense words) in order to assess decoding skills.

• Spelling: Student ability to spell and encode are tested with this task.

• Vocabulary: This task consists of selecting synonyms or related words of certain target words.

• Listening Comprehension: Students answer questions about a passage they’ve heard in order to gauge their listening comprehension skills.

• Oral Reading Fluency: This task consists of reading a passage to ascertain overall fluency and other threads of mastery. The passage is dynamically calibrated to better gauge student ability.

• Reading Comprehension: Students answer questions about the passage they’ve read to gauge their comprehension and vocabulary-in-context skills.

• Visual Attention Task: Visual Attention task assesses a student’s ability to focus on relevant visual stimuli by asking them to quickly identify specific target images in a grid of similarlooking distractors within 60 seconds.

Download:  Standard & Optional Reading Tasks by Grade Level

Sample Assessment Task Videos