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By the time your students reach 3rd grade, a small percentage of them will likely be dubbed “struggling readers.”

The question is, why are these students struggling?

It is widely accepted that success at basic comprehension means mastering several critical components of language, including:

• Vocabulary
• Fluency
• Word Recognition
• Decoding

Questar's new assessment tool - Reading Power Essentials - is the only single assessment program that measures all the elements singled out by the National Reading Panel as critical to becoming a successful reader.

Vocabulary - RPE Vocabulary tests, multiple-choice in format, assess students' knowledge of words that commonly occur in their grade. Words that are likely to be in use across the curriculum are featured to assess more general word knowledge. This feature may be especially useful with your English Language Learners.

Fluency - Reading fluency is a critical window in your students' mastery of sentence level processing (and therefore concepts). In the RPE Fluency test, students read aloud grade-specific reading passages from the RPE Fluency Prompts Book. Teachers record student performance on consumable RPE Fluency Record Forms. These records provide crucial information about students' reading rate and accuracy, two components known to be excellent predictors of reading comprehension.

WoRD - RPE WoRD tests consist of two critical tasks: word recognition and decoding. The word recognition task assesses the extent to which students can quickly recognize grade-level appropriate, familiar words; the decoding task requires the student to decode increasingly difficult, phonologically regular, nonsense words. Each of the "words" to be decoded follows the permissible sound combinations of English. This is an excellent task to use with your lowest level struggling readers and your English Language Learners.

In both the word recognition and decoding tasks, students read aloud grade-specific word lists from the RPE WoRD Prompts Book. Teachers record student performance on consumable RPE WoRD Record Forms.

STEP 1:  Identify Your Struggling Readers.

To know who's reading at grade level and who is struggling, you need to start with a measure of reading comprehension. And why not start with the gold standard?

In the Reading Power Essentials (RPE) suite of assessments, student comprehension is first assessed with the highly regarded Degrees of Reading Power® (DRP®) comprehension tests, available for students in grades 1-12+. For over 25 years, DRP tests have been used in school districts across the United States and today form part of the highly successful, state-mandated Connecticut Mastery Test and the New York Regents Competency Test.

In DRP tests, your students read a series of nonfiction passages that increase in difficulty over the length of the test. Their comprehension is determined by their ability to correctly answer items that are embedded in the text. Not only will your students' scores show you who is reading below the standards set by your school or district, but, because their scores are reported on a unique, DRP text difficulty scale, you can evaluate their ability relative to your actual curriculum materials.

STEP 2:  Find Out Where and Why They Are Struggling.

The new vocabulary, fluency, and word reading modules of Reading Power Essentials help you dig deeper and find out why some students have difficulty with comprehension.

Available for students in grades 3 through 8, the assessments work both on a stand-alone basis, and in concert with one another.

RPE Vocabulary Tests

RPE Vocabulary tests, multiple-choice in format, assess students’ knowledge of words that commonly occur in their grade. Words that are likely to be in use across the curriculum are featured to assess more general word knowledge. This feature may be especially useful with your English Language Learners.

RPE Fluency Tests

Reading fluency is a critical window into your students’ mastery of sentence level processing (and therefore concepts). In the RPE Fluency test, students read aloud grade-specific reading passages from the RPE Fluency Prompts Book. Teachers record student performance on consumable RPE Fluency Record Forms. These records provide crucial information about students’ reading rate and accuracy, two components known to be excellent predictors of reading comprehension.

RPE WoRD Tests

RPE WoRD tests consist of two critical tasks: word recognition and decoding. The word recognition task assesses the extent to which students can quickly recognize grade-level appropriate, familiar words; the decoding task requires the student to decode increasingly difficult, phonologically regular, nonsense words. Each of the “words” to be decoded follows the permissible sound combinations of English. This is an excellent task to use with your lowest level struggling readers and your English Language Learners.

In both the word recognition and decoding tasks, students read aloud grade-specific word lists from the RPE WoRD Prompts Book. Teachers record student performance on consumable RPE WoRD Record Forms.

STEP 3:  Begin Timely and Focused Intervention

According to research conducted by the National Reading Panel, well designed instruction, informed by assessment, can improve student performance in each of the areas critical for reading success. For suggestions on intervention strategies, click on the appropriate link below.

Vocabulary Building Strategies

Fluency Building Activities

Intervention Strategies for Students with
low word recognition and Decoding Scores

For complete pricing and ordering information please call one of our Customer Service Representatives at 1-800-800-2598.

While the last thing you may want to add to your instructional program is more testing, you also know that spending a little extra time at the beginning of the school year finding out exactly what your students’ current abilities are, is not about testing, it’s about succeeding – turning struggling readers into successful readers. And that is always time well spent!

With RPE scores in hand, you will make a much more efficient use of your instructional time by targeting your instruction toward those areas where students are weakest.

And because the elements of RPE are so easy to administer, repeating administrations of RPE throughout the school year is a simple way to measure students’ progress and the effectiveness of your instructional strategies.

Ordering Materials

For complete pricing and ordering information please call one of our Customer Service Representatives at 1-800-800-2598.