Running Records, Foundational Assessments and Benchmarks

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TCRWP Reading Benchmarks and ‘Grades’ in 2020

Many administrators have been asking about reading benchmarks, and whether those change this year, with school starting late, and the many other stresses that teachers and students have experienced. Our advice is that benchmarks themselves not shift. Benchmarks let us know when there is trouble so that we can move heaven and earth to better support students. We want to change students’ success with reading, not change the data, thus putting off until later awareness and need to improve conditions. Read More…

Running Records Assessments/NYC MoSL Assessments

The running record assessment forms provide a book introduction, the typed text, a sidebar of reading characteristics, a scoring guide, comprehension questions with sample responses, and space to take notes and to jot student responses. A Teacher Guidebook for Levels A-K and one for Levels L-Z is available in the Supporting Documents of each folder and explains in detail the assessments and includes suggestions for how to use the assessments to plan differentiated, explicit instruction for each student assessed.

There are many ways you may choose to use our running records assessments.

General Running Records Assessments

If you are not using these assessments as your school’s New York State SLO assessments or New York City MoSL, you should look to our General Running Records Assessments folder. There you will find our most recently researched and supported A-K running records, which include two titles of purchasable assessment books, available from Kaeden Publishers, for every level, A-K. The Kaeden order form can be found in this same folder. There are also two sets of text excerpts for levels L-Z which include student and teacher copies. You will also find additional archived assessments at levels A-K, aligned to texts published by Lee & Low and Scholastic publishers, along with their relevant order forms.

New York City Measures of Student Learning Assessments (MoSL)

To support the New York City Measures of Student Learning (MoSL) requirements, we continue to offer two sets of running records: one for Beginning-of-Year (BOY) assessment and one for the EOY assessment. These can be found in the folder titled “TCRWP New York City Measures of Student Learning (MoSL).” The NYCDOE states that these texts should be used in place of older versions of TCRWP books, and books must only be used as labeled for BOY and EOY. If desired, the BOY texts can also be used as interim assessments across the school year. For questions regarding MoSL, please contact the DOE at periodicassessment@schools.nyc.gov.

Please note, NYC MoSL information is current as of September 2018.

New York State-approved Student Learning Objectives (SLO)

TCRWP Running Records is a New York State-approved option for determining and assessing Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). In this folder, you’ll find two sets of running records, levels A-Z. The A-K sets require purchased texts published by Kaeden: the order form can be found in the Supporting Document folder.

Please contact us at contact@readingandwritingproject.com if we can help you in any way.

Click here to download Kaeden's new order form for digital and paper books

Click here to download the TCRWP order form for periodic assessment, developed for NYC DOE schools.

How to Do Assessments Digitally

2020-2021 Running Records

Pre 2020 Running Records

Concepts About Print

Based on their home and early school experiences with print, children come with various understandings about the arbitrary conventions that we use to communicate meaning in print. An assessment of each child's level of understanding, and sometimes misunderstanding of these conventions, helps teachers know what their students are attending to in print and what they still need to learn.

Letter/Sound Identification

What does your student know about letters? Which letters can he/she identify? Although research has shown that students do not need to know the names of all letters before they begin reading books, knowing letters helps them communicate with the teacher and one another (Samuels, 1972). Being able to discriminate and quickly recognize important letters is also helpful in attaching sounds to the correct letters when reading words (Neuhaus, 2003).

High Frequency Words

The purpose of this assessment is to determine the number of high-frequency words that students know. LaBerge and Samuels (2006) call this automatic recognition of high frequency words part of automaticity. They state that when these words are instantly recognized, the short term memory is not overloaded and is freed to focus on comprehension of what is going on in the story. Therefore, this assessment can be used throughout the year to record students' growth in automatic word recognition. Ehri (1998) found students eventually encapsulate the letters of a word into a bonded unit that is recognized immediately.

Independent Reading Benchmarks

The Independent Reading Benchmarks lay out a continuum of growth based on the expectation that students will enter kindergarten as emergent readers and finish eighth grade reading at level Z.