Core Subjects

Accelerated Reader:

Accelerated Reader is a curriculum-based assessment tool that provides a summary and analysis of results to enable teachers to monitor both the quantity and quality of reading practice engaged in by their students. Students administer comprehension tests voluntarily themselves, and the system is intended specifically to have strong formative effects on subsequent learning.

Most books have an Accelerated Reader (AR) quiz. Each book is assigned a point value based on the number of words it contains and its reading difficulty, as derived from a formula based on the well-known Flesch-Kincaid readability index that considers the number of syllables in words and sentence complexity.

After reading, the student accesses his/her account on a school computer and takes a multiple-choice comprehension test on the book’s content. Tests may have 5, 10, or 20 items, depending on the length and difficulty of the book. The computer scores the test, awards the student points based on the results, and keeps a complete record.

Parents can use Renaissance Home Connect to keep up with their child’s reading progress. Simply go to Renaissance Home Connect. Use your child’s username and password. Your child should know this information because he/she uses this same information when logging into AR at school.

DIBELS NEXT

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS NEXT) are a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of early literacy skills from Kindergarten through Sixth Grade. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of early literacy and reading skills.

DIBELS are comprised of seven measures to function as indicators of phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency with connected text, reading comprehension and vocabulary. DIBELS were designed for use in identifying students experiencing difficulty in the acquisition of basic early literacy skills in order to provide early support and prevent the occurrence of later reading difficulties.

DIBELS were developed based on measurement procedures for Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), which were created by Deno and colleagues through the Institute for Research and Learning Disabilities at the University of Minnesota in the 1970-80s. Like CBM, DIBELS were developed to be economical and efficient indicators of a student’s progress toward achieving a general outcome.

Initial research on DIBELS was conducted at the University of Oregon in the late 1980s. Since then, an ongoing series of studies on DIBELS has documented the reliability and validity of the measures as well as their sensitivity to student change. The DIBELS authors were motivated then, as now, by the desire to improve educational outcomes for children, especially those from poor and diverse backgrounds. Research on DIBELS continues at DMC and at numerous universities and research institutions around the world.

Saint John the Baptist Elementary administers DIBELS to students, Grades K-5, three times per year – Beginning – Middle – End – and adheres to the DIBELS Next Benchmarks.

ACT ASPIRE

Saint John the Baptist Elementary administers the ACT Aspire to students, Grades 3-5. The ACT Aspire provides the following features and functions:

• a standards-based system of assessments to monitor progress toward college and career readiness from grade 3 through early high school, connecting each grade level to the next
• assessment, data management and reporting functions for all students, aggregated and disaggregated groups of learners, and the individual learner
• alignment with the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks
• student outcomes aligned to the Domain and Cluster reporting categories of the Common Core State Standards
• capability for predicting outcomes on the ACT