The Names Test

A quick way to check decoding skills

Prepare the Instrument

Type sheet with 25 names (or index cards)

Prepare scoring sheet

Administer test

• Individually
• Quiet place
• Have student read entire list
• Check each correct word on score sheet

Score and interpret test

• Count correct if all syllables except accent are correct (Yo`/lan/da or Yo/lan/da`)
• Do not consider syllable breaks (Ho/mer or Hom/er)
• Analyze the names mispronounced for specific patterns or difficulties with decoding

Names

Jay Conway	Chester Wright	Grace Brewster
Tim Cornell	Ginger Yale	Ned Westmoreland
Chuck Hoke	Patrick Tweed	Ron Smitherman
Yolanda Clark	Stanley Shaw	Troy Whitlock
Kimberly Blake	Wendy Swain	Vance Middleton
Roberta Slade	Glen Spencer	Zane Anderson
Homer Preston	Fred Sherwood	Bernard Pendergraph
Gus Quincy	Flo Thornton
Cindy Sampson	Dee Skidmore

What can be learned?

• Difficulty with words with more than two syllables
• Difficulties with initial digraphs
• Substituting know words for unknown ones
• Consistent difficulty with specific phonemes

STAR Reading Test

The sun ______ in the early morning.

A. rises

B. sets

C. falls

D. fades

Overview

The STAR reading test is designed to provide the teacher with immediate information:

• The student's independent reading level
• The student's reading grade equivalent
• The student's reading zone of proximal development
• Instructions for the teacher to maximize the student's reading growth

What we've discovered

Independent reading levels vary from test to test for single students.

• Can vary as much as 5 grades up.
• Can vary as much as 3 grades down.

No correlation with informal reading inventories

More discoveries

No research regarding the product can be found in the usual educational and psychological databases

All "Research" done by 'The Institute for Academic Excellence' (a subsidiary of Advantage Learning - train all teachers in advantage learning software)

Even the institutional white papers are hard to get

What does the research say?

Zone of Proximal Development

Normed with and compared to other standardized tests

• CogAT (Cognitive Abilities Test)???
• Stanford-9
• 16 others

Correlates with higher-order thinking??

Other Research???

"I feel STAR is a very effective assessment tool. We really appreciate the immediate feedback."

"The STAR program has been very beneficial for us in helping determine our students' Independent Reading Level."

Value of STAR?

May be a useful tool to determine reading level of students

Average of several scores to get accurate level?

Used with Accelerated Reader, it may help teachers find books at student's level

May be too expensive for what it really does