Progress Assessments

The new Progress Assessments in Discover Intensive Phonics 4.0 are broader and more powerful than ever before. An Administrator oversees Progress Assessments, so their results are dependent on the administrator’s listening skills and judgment. Progress Assessments establish the reading level of each student and customize the curriculum to suit the student’s individual needs. Progress Assessments are optional and can be given as often as desired.

The Progress Assessments are made up of four components: Phonemic Awareness, Reading Grade Level, Most Common Words, and Nonsense Words.

Phonemic Awareness

This first assessment correlates with five of the seven DIBELS phonologic assessments and also aligns with the framework of the Discover Intensive Phonics program. It contains sections that test:

• Rhyming (screen shot).
• Identification of syllables.
• Recognition of initial, medial, and final phonemes.
• Phoneme blending.
• Identification of phonemes.

The curriculum is automatically customized based on the results of the assessment. Students who struggle with phonemic awareness will be given extra practice in the Phonemic Awareness activity.

Reading Grade Level

This assessment provides a fast, accurate calculation of a student’s reading grade level. Ten lists of 20 words each are provided and correlate to grade levels pre-primer through 12th. Words from these lists are shown for students to read aloud and include words a student should be able to recognize. An administrator will judge whether the student pronounced each word correctly.

Based on the student’s performance, an advanced student may be presented with an abbreviated version of the course, which skips phonemic awareness portions of lessons that teach the letters of the alphabet.

The word lists were selected based on similar words used in the San Diego Quick Assessment, Border Test of Reading-Spelling Patterns, Rapid Test, Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT), and the Slosson Oral Reading Test (SORT).

Most Common Words

In this assessment, 40 high-frequency words are shown for a student to read. If the student performs poorly, he will be shown 40 additional words to allow him to improve his score. If a student scores above 85 percent on this section, the software will automatically customize the course to bypass Most Common Words instruction.

Nonsense Words

This assessment is divided into two portions of 40 words each. The first 40 words test for recognition of individual phonemes. The second 40 continue that process and also test for mispronunciation based on the phonetic pattern of a word, including silent E, adjacent vowel patterns, and other patterns.

When a word is mispronounced, the test administrator has the ability to identify the individual phonemes missed. Test reports will then contain detailed information on those phonemes as well as the decoding patterns most often misread by the student.