Questar Assessment, Inc.

Designed for use in kindergarten through grade 3, Signposts™ is a modular early literacy assessment program that provides teachers with a set of tools to monitor students' reading progress. Signposts delivers information that is accurate, comprehensive, timely, and tailored to the needs of the different audiences for assessment information.

Early assessment is crucial for early literacy development. Before you can plan a curriculum that will help your students achieve literacy success, you have to know what they know – right from the start. From your students’ first months in kindergarten, you should have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

With Signposts from Questar, you can:

• Create profiles of students' literacy development
• Identify students who are lagging behind
• Monitor the effectiveness of ongoing instruction
• Provide a year-end snapshot of integrated literacy performance
• Meet school- or district-level accountability demands
• Provide a unique set of integrated assessments
• Represent widely accepted standards of literacy development
• Span a range of literacy strands – reading, writing, listening, and speaking

Signposts is designed as an assessment system. It includes:

• The Early Literacy Battery – a group-administered test covering the areas identified in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) as critical for literacy development
• Pre-DRP Test – an easy-to-administer, holistic assessment modeled on the DRP test
• Informal Assessments – a set of individually administered literacy tasks and observational protocols that provide information about core areas of a student’s literacy development
• Performance Tasks – a set of summative literacy tasks that integrate the key strands of literacy

Signposts is designed with a high degree of overlap from level to level to allow for the seamless measurement of language arts development. The Signposts Scope and Sequence (PDF) shows this continuum. All children develop at their own pace, in the primary grades especially. You may wish to use the recommendations indicated in the table below as a general guideline.

Please note that Pre-DRP tests, recommended for mid-year testing, are also included in the Early Literacy Battery (SA-2, SA-3, SA-4), so progress can be monitored from beginning to end of the school year. The Early Literacy Battery SA-5 test form includes a DRP test.