No. 167      Institute for Learning

The district’s participation in the Governor’s Reading Initiative has afforded Enhanced Kindergarten and Enhanced Grade 1 teachers with the opportunity to participate in 120 hours of literacy professional development. As part of the district’s participation in the reading initiative, Kindergarten and Grade 1 students are required to be assessed at the end of the school year, using a common set of reading assessments.

Kindergarten students will be given the Beginning Phonics Skills Test (BPST). The BPST takes approximately 30 minutes per student to administer. Grade 1 students will be given the End-of-Year Fluency test. The fluency test is designed to take approximately 2 minutes per student.

These assessments, along with the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA), provide valuable information in determining how well students are meeting reading standards in phonemic awareness, decoding, word recognition, fluency, accuracy, and comprehension.

The end-of-year phonics test assesses consonant sounds and names, consonant digraph sounds, short vowel sounds, blending words, and phonemic awareness. The standards for phonemic awareness and decoding are a key part of early reading development. The BPST provides a source of information in determining how well students are meeting the Phonemic Awareness and Decoding substrands within the state standards.

The BPST/End-of-Year Fluency Assessment must be administered during the last month of the school year to all Kindergarten and Grade 1 students. This includes Fluent English students and English Learners in all program settings.

The BPST/Fluency Assessment will be distributed to schools in early May. Along with the assessment, schools will receive materials that include instructions for distribution and testing, pre-printed rosters/scan sheets for reporting student scores, and class sets of teacher record sheets.

Pre-printed rosters (Fluency Assessment) or scan sheets (BPST) will be sent to schools prior to the administration of each assessment. After assessing each student, teachers will return completed classroom rosters/scan sheets to the school principal. The principal or designee will collect all Kindergarten and Grade 1 assessments, certify completion, and return the completed classroom rosters/scan sheets to the Standards and Assessment Office at the Eugene Brucker Education Center, Annex 3, by June 8, 2001 (traditional calendar schools) or July 13, 2001 (single-track year-round schools). Please direct questions related to the BPST/Fluency Assessment score reporting to the Standards and Assessment Office at (619) 725-7172.