CBMreading
CBMreading is a research-based assessment offered in English for grades 1-8 and in Spanish for grades 1-6.
By listening to a student read, a teacher can learn many important details about the student’s current reading skills, including evidence of skills in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. These are skills identified in the National Reading Panel (NRP) Report published in 2000.
In addition, CBMreading is aligned with the skills included in the Common Core State Standards for English and Language Arts (2010). These standards cover three domains, including foundational skills in reading, reading literature, and reading informational texts.
CBMreading measures a student’s proficiency in the following Foundational Skills subcategories:
Print Concepts is the organization and basic feature of print.
Phonological Awareness is the understanding of spoken word syllables and sounds or phonemes.
Phonics and Word Recognition is the application of grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.
Fluency refers to reading on-level texts with sufficient purpose, accuracy, and fluency to support comprehension.
Substantial research evidence demonstrates that CBMreading is a robust indicator of reading development and a useful predictor of student performance on state tests.
CBMreading Spanish
Available for universal screening (grades 1-6) and frequent progress monitoring (grades 1-5), the Spanish assessments were developed by bilingual researchers in collaboration with native Spanish-speaking teachers and literacy leaders.
Unlike many other Spanish oral reading assessments, these tools were not translated from English passages, nor were they based on a model of English reading development. Rather, they were constructed in consideration of reading milestones in Spanish.
Considerations were made during development to help ensure that the passages were not only linguistically accurate and flowed smoothly, but were also age-appropriate.
Our careful development of CBMreading in Spanish has led to a set of assessment materials that meet high standards from technical and linguistic perspectives.
Screening
As a screening assessment, CBMreading is intended to identify students who are at risk for reading difficulties and to guide instructional decisions. When used for universal screening, students read three short passages developed for their grade level three times a year (i.e., fall, winter, and spring).
Instruction can be made more or less resource intensive and individualized for students requiring the most support. At the school level, student growth can be tracked and monitored, allowing administrators to look at improvements across grades and academic years.
Progress Monitoring
CBMreading is uniquely designed to accommodate quick, easy, frequently delivered assessments (e.g., weekly, biweekly), which provide useful data to monitor student progress and evaluate response to instruction.
Administration
CBMreading uses standardized administration and scoring procedures, which were designed and developed to optimize the consistency of data collected across students. CBMreading provides teachers with a direct link to instruction, allowing them to determine if and when instructional adaptations are needed, to set ambitious but attainable goals for students, and to monitor progress toward those goals.
