Our highly regarded Degrees of Reading Power™ (DRP™) Program provides a holistic, criterion-referenced measure of how well students understand the meaning of text. DRP test results help classroom teachers, literacy instructors, and reading specialists – as well as local, district, and state-level administrators – support the development of each student’s reading power.
Growth in reading ability occurs when students read materials at their appropriate reading level. To help students meet the reading challenges of the classroom, state assessments, and beyond, student reading gains must be accurately measured and supported by linking comprehension ability with text difficulty.
The Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) Program is the basis of a highly regarded line of reading comprehension tests for students in grades 1 through 12. The tests are criterion-referenced and allow precise tracking of a student’s reading development over time.
DRP Tests were the first criterion-referenced assessments to utilize the concept of readbility. The A and B series, published in fall 2008, continues the tradition. While the latest forms have an updated look, new passages, and slightly shorter length, they are fully compatible with previous forms, provide the same reliability, and offer teachers more options for Fall, mid-year, and Spring testing.
Primary and Standard DRP tests are holistic measures of how well students understand the meaning of text. Test results are reported on the DRP Scale of Text Difficulty – the same scale that is used to measure the reading difficulty of printed material. By linking students’ DRP test scores with the readability values of books, teachers are able to locate, assign, or recommend textbooks, literature, and popular titles of appropriate difficulty to their students.
The DRP Program from Questar is the original, research-based, standards-driven reading program, featuring:
- Both paper-and-pencil and Web-based assessments
- Online eDRP tests that provide immediate results
- DRP Booklink software listing more than 36,000 titles to complement your curricula
- On-demand readability analyses of textbooks and literature
- Flexible scoring and reporting services to meet your needs – including choice of score reports for parents, teachers, and school and district administrators
- Ancillary publications that help you interpret and effectively use DRP scores
Easy to order and administer, the program helps educators and administrators:
- Set literacy goals
- Identify and zero in on special populations – including struggling readers, gifted and talented students, and English language learners
- Monitor student progress
- Predict high-stakes state test results
- Link students to appropriate books and compile reading lists
- Evaluate instructional effectiveness
DRP Scale of Text Difficulty
The DRP Program reports student test results on the DRP Scale of Text Difficulty, Questar’s custom scale used to assess the difficulty of written materials.
By linking students' DRP test scores with the readability values of books, teachers are able to locate, assign, or recommend textbooks, literature, and popular titles of appropriate difficulty to their students – and help students make gains in real-life literacy.