Why is assessing reading and literacy important for all subjects?
Reading is a basic skill that all students need in order to access the curriculum across all subject areas.
If students can’t read, they cannot engage with the world around them. Understanding every student’s reading ability supports personalised learning by ensuring all teachers can pitch learning at just the right level of challenge. With robust, accurate assessment data leading the way, practitioners can action the insights gained in a deliberate and purposeful way.
Reading is a basic skill that all students need to access the curriculum across all subject areas.
The test allows you to assess all students – not just your weakest readers – meaning you can track progress and performance over time
What is NGRT?
The New Group Reading Test (NGRT) is a group screener of reading that can be used at a school or cohort level to quickly understand the needs of your learners in terms of their reading, decoding and comprehension skills.
Schools can use NGRT as a first port of call to flag students’ reading strengths and challenge areas. Practitioners can then start to think about next steps and the implications for teaching and learning, in addition to any other areas of need that may require investigation.
The assessment can be used to flag common reading areas of challenge such as language acquisition, poor comprehension or phonetic gaps. Teachers find it useful to support an initial understanding of need, which might lead to diagnoses of dyslexia, speech and language or poor memory and recall difficulties.
The test allows you to assess all students – not just your weakest readers – meaning that you can track progress and performance over time and see, as a school, how children are acquiring and developing their reading skills at all levels.
How can NGRT adapt to EAL learners needs?
NGRT is made up of two parts – passage comprehension and sentence completion.
Every student starts with the sentence completion section, which tests knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and syntax without contextual clues. Most students will then move on to the passage comprehension section, which includes retrieval, inference, deduction and detailed content comprehension.
Students who score very low according to their age in the sentence completion section will not usually complete the comprehension section, but the assessment adapts and provides them with a phonics section instead. So, you get a really personalised assessment and an indication of where areas of difficulty lie.
With EAL learners, it may be that they have good language knowledge but need support with academic language, commonly found in subject-specific texts. Or it may be that they need support with language acquisition, and if so, what kind of language are they struggling with? Is it subject specific or conversational English? The test will allow you to see what that need actually is and then you can support accordingly.
If the student has lower NGRT scores, then it may not be because they’re an EAL learner, there may be some learning difficulties. So, you could use NGRT as a starting point and then look at the SEND guide to support further identification.
The test will allow you to see what that need actually is and then you can support accordingly.
The most important piece of information that NGRT gives is a standard age score (SAS). This is a student’s raw score converted into a score that takes into account the student’s precise age (in years and months) and benchmarks it to a national database.
What data does NGRT provide?
The most important piece of information that NGRT gives is a standard age score (SAS). This is a student’s raw score converted into a score that takes into account the student’s precise age (in years and months) and benchmarks it to a national database.
This means that you're looking at your learners compared to other learners of the same age. It's the fairest score that you can use to derive where a child is in terms of their reading.
NGRT then divides the scores into nine different groups or stanines. This allows you to group students according to need so you can start to resource accordingly and make those strategic decisions. It provides a broad overview of performance from 1 (very low) through to 9 (very high) – typically SENCOs can focus on those in stanines 1 to 3 and reading leads work with students in stanines 4 and above.
We’ve created reader profiles that translate the data into a need so, it’s easier to get a snapshot of each learner’s nuanced reading need in a qualitative way. Are they an emerging reader? Are they a completely independent reader? What level of support might they need?
NGRT also provides a national percentile rank which allows you to see where the student sits within the overall standardisation sample – and a group rank where you can see how a student is performing within your class or school.
How can NGRT be used to help all school staff support EAL learners?
It’s important that all school staff have a picture of reading within their class or group.
We've developed our Reading Support Pathway that translates the data into a profile description, enabling all staff to understand the nuance of need so they can fine-tune support for students. Staff are able to get a quick view of what the data means, where a child might be, what their needs are, and how to progress their reading by providing the right support.
Some learners might have a SAS that is quite high and you could think that they don’t need additional support. But the student might have what we call a ‘spikey profile’, where their sentence completion and passage comprehension scores are uneven or unbalanced, and there's a discrepancy of two or more stanines between them.
That could be powerful for a history teacher, for example, who could see that a particular student is really good at comprehension, but there is a vocabulary need. Word lists could then be provided for the lesson, so the student has the vocabulary and definitions to hand.
Without NGRT it would be very difficult to personalise learning. NGRT provides actionable insights that allow teachers to be very deliberate in their practice.
NGRT is providing actionable insights that allow teachers to be very deliberate in their practice because they understand the needs of their students.
Talk to our specialists
If you would like to speak to one of our specialists about how we can support your students’ needs, including EAL, SEND, and gifted and talented learners, add your details to our form and we’ll get in touch.