For reading, the skills are stepping up in difficulty beginning with the fundamentals of reading: Letter Names, Phoneme Segmenting, Letter Sounds, and progressing up to the more difficult skills of Word Reading Fluency, Passage Reading Fluency, then Basic and Proficient Reading Comprehension. Students might perform well on the basic reading skills assessments written for higher grades but might need to drop down to lower grades on the more difficult skill sets. You are not only trying to determine where their knowledge lies but also their ability to read and understand words and sentences.

Phoneme Segmenting Fluency – this assessment is generally most appropriate for students whose instruction is focused on learning to differentiate between different sound units (phonemes) and becomes less appropriate as students become more adept at actually reading.

Letter Names Fluency – this assessment gives information about students’ automaticity in naming the letters but is not as predictive of later reading skill as Letter Sounds Fluency.

Letter Sounds Fluency – the most highly predictive of later reading proficiency of all the measures available at Kindergarten. It measures students’ ability to produce the sounds associated with letters and letter digraphs.

Word Reading Fluency – this is one of the two measures of Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) available in the easyCBM system. This assessment is most appropriate to use with students who are still reading individual words, one at a time, rather than ‘clusters’ of words together. Once students have begun to ‘chunk’ words together, the WRF measure begins to be too easy for them. For most students in Kindergarten, and many First Graders, this is the most appropriate oral reading fluency test to use.

Passage Reading Fluency. The Passage Reading Fluency tests are offered starting with Grade 1. If you need easier-access oral reading fluency measures, you can use the WRF measures from Kindergarten. WRF and PRF have a correlation of right around .98 with one another — they are assessing the same construct (oral reading fluency), just in a slightly different format.