Practice assessments are available for assessors to get comfortable with the digital assessment experience in the 95 Literacy Intervention System™ (LIS).
It is advisable to go through practice assessments a couple of times before live assessments are initiated to become acquainted and build confidence with the processes.
95 Literacy Intervention System™
If your district has the 95 Literacy Intervention System™ (LIS) enabled in the One95™ platform, practice assessments will be available.
The LIS is an assessment system that lives in the One95 platform. This digital toolset empowers you to identify phonological awareness and phonics skill gaps, group students with similar reading challenges, and deliver targeted instruction using recommended resources from the One95™ Literacy Ecosystem™. Student data is aggregated to provide 360-degree visibility at the school and district levels, automating time-consuming workflows. With the LIS, students receive the help they need to move out of intervention and become successful readers.
Contact your main district contact to learn more about the LIS.
Practice Assessments Overview
The lift from administering paper and pencil to digital assessments is not always easy.
Practice assessments allow users to administer digital assessments without affecting student data while the LIS provides feedback on how to improve. They empower you to check your calibration of scoring to ensure it is accurate.
Within practice assessments, you will listen to recordings of students reading Phonics Screener for Intervention™ (PSI) assessment prompts and get comfortable with scoring along as it plays.
Once you have finished the assessment, the LIS surfaces incorrectly marked scores via lightning bolt icons and isolates the sounds so that you can hear how and why the scores were flagged.
Launching Practice Assessments
Practice assessments can be started on the Student Details page.
Access the Student Details page by selecting a listing or student info card within the My Activities or My Students tabs of the Today page, respectively.
Any student without a pending assessment can be selected to start a practice assessment. No information from practice assessments will be stored on the selected student record.
Complete the Actions panel as follows.
Assessment Type
Assessment types indicate the type of diagnostic used to evaluate students' early literacy skills. Alongside practice assessments, three assessment types are available in the LIS.
Select Practice Assessment from the Assessment Type drop-down.
Select a form
Forms are an alternate set of question prompts for diagnostic assessments.
Determine the assessment form within the Select a form drop-down.
There are three forms available: Form A, Form B, and Form C. All three forms assess skills in the same way and are equivalent to each other.
When completing this field, consider what forms have already been used within practice assessments. For example, if Form A was used on the initial practice assessment for a given skill, leverage Form B on the reassessment to provide a distinct set of prompts.
Start a skill
Select the starting assessment skill in the Start a skill drop-down. There are 15 PSI skills available.
Click START ASSESSMENT to begin administering the practice assessment.
Navigating Practice Assessments
Practice assessments look identical to live assessments except you are provided with recordings of students reading the prompts.
The Score Marks, Common Errors, Notes, and Signals sections are how you score and evaluate both live and practice PSI assessments within the LIS.
Practice assessments can help prepare you to leverage these capabilities effectively before evaluating students.
Primary Score Marks
There are four primary score marks within the Score Marks section: red X, hesitation and self-correct, sound-by-sound, and green check.
Other errors specific to each prompt may be presented in a Common Errors section.
Red X
Use the red X mark to indicate a prompt is read incorrectly.
Once you have begun incorporating the Common Errors section into your assessment workflow, this mark can be used for wrong answers that you cannot pinpoint.
Hesitation and Self-Correct
Use the hesitation and self-correct mark to indicate hesitation and/or self-correction but ultimately the correct pronunciation.
This mark can be used as a notational element.
Sound-By-Sound
Use the sound-by-sound mark to indicate sounding out a prompt that is ultimately the correct pronunciation.
This mark can be used as a notational element.
Green Check
Use the green check mark to indicate a word is read correctly.
Best Practices
It is advisable to only use the green check and red X score marks at first to get comfortable with scoring diagnostic assessments.
Once you are comfortable with the scoring process, noting the student’s fluency via the hesitation and self-correct mark and sound-by-sound marks can help assessors determine whether students have full mastery of a skill. Flagging a student’s level of ease during the assessment is important in this analysis.
Move on to incorporating the common errors into your scoring workflow once the score marks are familiar.
Scores can be changed mid-assessment by clicking on the prompt and selecting a new mark. However, it is advisable to focus on listening to the student and picking up the reading and scoring rhythm, especially in the beginning.
Score marks can be modified within the Assessment Summary page once live assessments are stopped. Support your review by playing back the captured audio.
To learn more about this page, reference our article on Assessment Summary Page.
Common Errors
The Common Errors section offers additional error marks that represent common errors most frequently heard for each word. These score marks can provide more insight into what the student is or is not understanding.
While scoring prompts, common pronunciation errors are dynamically presented. These common errors can help newer educators refine their observational listening skills.
Common errors can be green or red.
- Green common errors are notational as they do not count as a scored error. They indicate the student pronounced the target digraph correctly but may not have read all sounds correctly.
- Red common errors count as a scored error.
It takes practice and routine to build up the ability to manage the available choices — including the score marks — while focusing attention on observing and listening at the same time.
Within live assessments, there is a Show Common Errors toggle that hides the Common Errors section. It is advisable to turn off the common errors by disabling the toggle, which is enabled by default, until you are comfortable incorporating them.
Notes
Capture notes within the Notes section.
Like paper and pencil assessments, note informal observations, standout error patterns, or trends that you would like to record for future reference. Notes can be viewed by all users with visibility into the student within the LIS.
Signals
Signal checkboxes offer a quick way to record student reading patterns that persist across words in an assessment.
Tracking Sequence
If the student is not reading from left to right, mark the Tracking Sequence checkbox.
Consonant Confusion
If the student is confusing consonants (e.g., B and D), mark the Consonant Confusion checkbox. This can help educators know when it might be helpful to spend specific time with the student on these patterns which may not be covered in core instruction or intervention.
Pacing
If the student is reading too slowly or too quickly and missing words, mark the Pacing checkbox.
Listening and Scoring
When you are ready to begin the practice assessment, click the PLAY button below the Recording section.
Student audio will begin to play after a three-second countdown. The audio cannot be paused and plays until the timer runs out.
Playing the audio allows you to begin scoring the prompts and adding the notational elements. These capabilities will be grayed out until the PLAY button is selected.
Once the audio is finished playing and scoring is completed for the skill, click CONTINUE to proceed to the next subtest or skill. Note that Skills P1 through P9 are tested in two parts.
From there, click the PLAY button to play the audio and repeat the process.
Click STOP to stop the practice assessment at any time.
After confirmation, you will return to the Today page.
Reviewing Practice Assessments
After completing one or many skills and stopping practice assessments, you will arrive at the Practice Assessment Summary page.
This page is identical to the live assessment’s Assessment Summary page except you cannot change your scores, view recommended 95 Percent Group resources to target student deficits, print the page’s information, or hold and save assessment data.
The LIS flags incorrectly scored prompts via lightning bolt icons.
Hover over the lightning bolt icons to isolate the audio from the recording and reflect on your score mark versus the system reference. Click the PLAY button to play this audio.
Audio can be replayed in its entirety by clicking the play icon below Session Recordings.
Click the ellipsis menu next to the volume icon to modify the audio’s playback speed. Next, click Playback speed and select an option from the drop-down. Note the playback speed does not affect the speed of isolated sounds.
Click Exit Practice Assessment once complete. Then, click Exit Assessment to return to the Today page.
To learn more about this page, reference our article on Today Page.
To learn more about digital assessments within the LIS, reference our article on Digital Assessments Overview.
To learn more about administering digital assessments, reference our article on Assessment Administration.
95 Percent Group Support is here to help! Contact us via the knowledge base support form or email at support@one95.app.
To learn more about submitting tickets, reference our article on One95™ Support.
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