Searching for the right reading assessments for your school district can feel a bit like running a marathon with lead weights hanging from your shoulders.
The pressure is on, and the stakes are high. If your district gets this wrong, it means missing students who need reading help and failing to provide the right supports for kids who need intervention.
You’ve likely heard the saying, “good assessments tell us where to go,” and it’s certainly true of reading assessments.
Here’s where things are about to get tricky.
The truth is, you don’t just need a reading assessment.
Districts need an entire reading assessment suite — a whole system of assessments designed to help identify students’ reading strengths, challenges, and overall progress.
What makes this a must-have for improving student outcomes, and how do you build the assessment suite for K-5 that will actually help your district achieve its literacy goals?
Let’s dig in!
Reading Assessments vs. Reading Assessment Suites: What’s the Difference?
You’re likely familiar with useful assessments like DIBELS and PAST, but to get the most accurate assessment data, one tool is not going to cut it.
You need an entire assessment suite, a comprehensive system of assessments that will help your instructional team understand where a reader is, where they need to go, and whether current instruction is getting them there.
We know, it sounds overwhelming. But the benefit to students and teachers makes it worth wading through the vast sea of available reading assessments and choosing the right ones to gather the data you need. Plus, we’re here to simplify the process.
How Reading Assessment Suites Work
Think of individual reading assessments like those routine checks that happen each time you go to the doctor—blood pressure, temperature, weight. Each one gives you valuable information about one aspect of your health.
An assessment suite, on the other hand, is like a comprehensive medical workup. It strategically combines multiple assessments to get the full picture and inform and monitor targeted treatment. When your suite is complete, it will be easy to gather all the information you need about students’ reading strengths, challenges, and overall progress.
What Are the Main Types of Reading Assessments?
There are four main types of reading assessments used in grades K-5, and each kind serves a different purpose. Here are some descriptions of these reading assessments and how each can be used as a part of an effective assessment suite.
Screening Assessments
Answer the Questions: “Who has needs? Who’s at risk?”
Reading screeners — sometimes called benchmark screening assessments — are broad assessments used at different intervals (usually about three times per school year) to determine students’ levels of risk or proficiency with certain reading skills.
Screening assessments should be:
- Brief in duration
- Administered to all students at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year
Think of screening assessments like smoke detectors. They can alert you to potential problems, but they generally don’t provide specific information about what’s happening, i.e., which skills students need support with or how to address problems.
Look for screening assessments that are widely validated and research-backed, such as:
- DIBELS
- FastBridge
- Acadience
Diagnostic Assessments
Answer the Question: “What exactly are the needs?”
Unlike screeners, diagnostic assessments are not administered to the entire student population. They’re typically administered only to kids who are identified during a screening assessment as having reading risk indicators.
A diagnostic assessment can:
- Help identify mastered skills
- Determine where intervention should begin
- Pinpoint the specific skills or knowledge a student might be missing so that targeted instruction can be used to close those gaps
Using diagnostic screening tools to identify individual student needs isn’t just important; it’s a strategy that’s growing in popularity. As of June 2025, 54 percent of public schools reported this strategy was “very” or “extremely effective” in supporting learning recovery, up from 49 percent the prior year.
Free high-quality diagnostic assessments include:
Progress Monitoring Assessments
Answer the Question: “Is our instruction working?”
Progress monitoring (PM) gives you a feedback loop about instruction. The data should help you decide “Should I continue this intervention or make a change?”
PM assessments for reading should be aligned to the specific reading intervention and sensitive enough to show student growth over short time periods.
What does that look like in practice?
If a student is still mastering basic letter recognition and sounds, for example, you might use Letter Name/Letter Sound (LN/LS) fluency as a measure of progress.
If a student has progressed to word reading but is still learning to decode and blend sounds, you may instead opt to use Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) to assess progress.
Critical Features of Good PM Tools
- Multiple alternate forms at the same difficulty level, allowing you to hold the difficulty constant over time so you can see performance increase as students acquire skills
- Frequent measurement capability, ideally weekly or bi-weekly, not monthly
- Sensitivity to small gains — for example, a good PM tool can detect improvement from five to eight letter sounds per minute
Progress monitoring data from Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions, especially, should be taken into consideration when determining the effectiveness of various curricula and interventions.
Measuring ABCs With CBMs
Curriculum-Based Measures (CBMs) are brief, standardized assessments that are designed to evaluate students’ academic progress and performance in specific areas aligned with the school curriculum. When it comes to early literacy, CBMs can be used to measure students’ oral reading fluency and other reading skills.
Although they are typically used for frequent progress monitoring, CBMs can also be universal screeners.
Summative Assessments
Answer the Question: “Are students meeting grade-level expectations after instruction?”
Screeners, diagnostics, and progress monitoring assessments are like rehearsals on the run up to the first night of the school play, allowing both students and teachers to spot gaps in understanding and make adjustments.
Summative assessments, on the other hand, are a bit like the “opening night” performance. Sometimes referred to as outcome evaluations, these tools are designed to determine what students have learned over the course of instruction.
Summative early literacy assessments can be used to:
- Measure Integrated Performance — Unlike DIBELS which focuses on component skills (fluency, accuracy), these assess whether students can actually apply all their literacy skills together to comprehend complex, grade-level passages.
- Evaluate Instructional Effectiveness — Summative literacy assessments answer the ultimate question: “After all our phonics instruction, progress monitoring, and interventions, are students actually meeting grade-level reading expectations?”
- Provide High-Stakes Accountability — These results often inform school ratings, funding decisions, and program evaluations in ways that your ongoing DIBELS data doesn’t.
Some summative assessments can be used as a formative assessment if instruction shifts based on the results.
How to Build the Right Reading Assessment Suite for Your District
No single tool can measure every skill and ability that goes into reading proficiently, so it’s vital to build a solid assessment suite that can provide a more complete picture of each student’s ability and what’s working (or what needs improvement) in your district.
When evaluating assessments and deciding which tools to use, here are some essential considerations.
1. Prioritize Literacy System Alignment
As you consider assessments, don’t forget to analyze your curriculum and interventions as well to ensure you have the right reading interventions in place to address the needs that arise.
Your district’s assessment data should connect logically to both your curriculum and intervention materials. For example, if a screener and follow-up diagnostic assessment suggest a student needs help with phonics, but the intervention programs in place focus on fluency, the assessment measures, that mismatch could undermine the whole system.
2. Consider Your District’s Implementation
A particular assessment may seem perfect on paper, but it’s not enough to adopt a high-quality tool, then go back to business as usual.
Each tool in your assessment suite needs to be used in service of improving student outcomes, with the components becoming an integral part of educators’ daily, weekly, monthly routines.
When you’re adopting your suite, you should already be thinking about how to implement these new tools in a manner that will ensure they:
- Serve as a point of reference for what is and is not working — from the individual level (student) all the way up to the school and district level
- Drive action plans
3. Analyze Validity, Reliability, and Classification Accuracy
First, let’s define these terms.
A valid assessment is one that accurately measures what it is designed to assess, including:
- Content Validity — The assessment measures relevant skills
- Construct Validity —The assessment measures intended skills without measuring other abilities
- Predictive Validity —The assessment accurately forecasts future reading achievement
Reliability refers to consistent and dependable results, i.e., the assessment will produce similar results if administered multiple times to the same student.
The classification accuracy of an assessment shows how well the assessment correctly measures an individual student’s reading ability.
How do you analyze the validity, reliability, and classification accuracy of a given assessment? There are tools for that! Check out the Academic Screening Tools Chart by the National Center for Intensive Intervention to investigate specific assessments and see how they rank for each of these factors.
| See How Commonly Reading Assessments Rate |
|---|
| Acadience Reading |
| DIBELS Composite |
| FastBridge CBMreading |
| FastBridge Adaptive Reading (aReading) |
| FastBridge earlyReading |
| iReady Diagnostic Reading |
| MAP Growth Reading |
| MAP Reading Fluency |
| Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) |
| Star Reading |
| Star CBM |
4. Be prepared to analyze outcomes and adjust over time
Even when you follow steps 1-3 to build or improve your assessment suite, it can take time to get a clear picture of how everything is working.
As you implement an assessment suite and start to analyze your data, consider the following:
- Are student reading outcomes improving?
- Are educators able to use the assessments accurately and consistently?
- Are you catching at-risk students early enough?
- Are interventions aligned to the assessments and effective?
If your current assessments aren’t leading to better reading instruction and improved student achievement, it’s time to reevaluate.
Ultimately, the best assessment system is the one that improves student outcomes.
Featured image via Department of Education/Flickr
