What is the Free Reading Assessment, and what data does it provide?
If your district purchased CommonLit School Essentials PRO or School Essentials PRO Plus, you will not have access to the Free Reading Assessment. Instead, you’ll be able to collect baseline data through the first assessment in the Assessment Series. You’ll also have access to a Mid-Year and a Post-Assessment to help you track students’ reading growth throughout the year.
The CommonLit Free Reading Assessment is a free, one-time test that measures students’ reading comprehension. The assessment can be administered once per school year for each student, either at the beginning of the school year or semester. This assessment provides you with data on their students' application of grade-level reading comprehension skills.
When students submit an assessment, you will be able to see their overall percent correct score as well as their average percent correct within individual standards groupings. The Free Reading Assessment covers Common Core State Standards R.1-R.6 or your state’s equivalent standards.
Additionally, students will receive a percentile ranking as long as they took the assessment at the grade level on their account. Percentile rankings show how students’ scores compare to all other CommonLit students who took the same test at the same grade level in the current school year.
Finally, students are placed into a Student Performance Group to provide a quick snapshot of how students performed. The Student Performance Groups listed below are based on percentile rankings:
- High Performance, 70th percentile or above
- Medium Performance, 30th - 69th percentile
- Low Performance, 11th - 30th percentile
- Very Low Performance, 0 - 10th percentile
Please note, to ensure the integrity of the data, there is no item analysis provided for the assessment. At this time, the assessment does not provide a reading level, such as a Lexile level, as a quantitative measure. Writing performance is not assessed by the assessment.
For information on how to access the Free Reading Assessment data, please see the FAQ: How do I view the Free Reading Assessment data?
Interested in getting affordable, rigorous benchmark assessments at your school or district to track student reading progress over the course of the year? Learn more about CommonLit's Assessments here.