Understanding the Reading Test results

Once your learners have completed the Bedrock Reading Test, you will be able to download the results of their assessment straight to your computer. This useful file provides a range of data, which can all be used to monitor and understand your learners’ reading abilities.

What do the different results mean?

We provide many points of data within this report. This variety gives you a holistic view of your learners’ reading ability, with actionable data that you can use to inform your in-class teaching or intervention where needed.

This handy glossary will help you read the results and decide which is most useful for you:

• Standard Age Score (SAS)
• Reading age
• SAS and reading age confidence bands
• Time taken on test
• Stanine
• National Percentile Rank (NPR)
• Group rank and group size
• Subskill scores

Standard Age Score (SAS)

The SAS tells you the reading ability of your learners, standardised to their age. If a learner has the exact reading ability that you would expect for their age, their score will be 100. If their score is less than 100, they are performing at a lower level than expected, and if their score is higher than 100, they are performing at a higher level for their age.

We recommend using the SAS as your main measurement of a learner’s reading ability, as it is easy to communicate, with 100 as the average.

Reading age

The reading age score gives you a chronological reading age for the learner, in years and months. For example, a learner with a score of 13:02 has the reading ability of a learner aged 13 years and 2 months. This measurement is based on the national sample.

SAS and reading age confidence bands

As with any form of assessment, all measurements have some margin for error. To account for this margin, your Reading Test results also include the upper and lower confidence bands, both for the SAS and reading age score.

In line with industry standards for testing reading ability, these confidence bands are set by a 90% interval. This means that we are 90% confident your learners’ true scores are within the specified range.

Time taken on test

This column tells you how long your learners took to complete the Reading Test, in minutes and seconds. If the test was paused at any point, this time will not count towards the total; only active time is counted.

Due to the Reading Test’s adaptive algorithm, each learner will have received a different number of questions during the test. Therefore, the time taken does not mean that a learner found the test easy or difficult, and should not be used to measure their reading ability.

However, you may find it useful to monitor the time taken, so you can check that your learners have sufficiently engaged with the test. For example, a very short time may indicate that the learner was not engaged, and will need to resit the Reading Test for an accurate result.

Stanines

Stanine stands for ‘standard nine,’ and can be a useful way to get a high-level overview of learners’ reading ability. The stanine divides the performance of learners into 9 bands, with 1 being the lowest and 9 being the highest. A learner who has an average reading ability for their age will fall into stanines 4-6. However, for a precise measurement, we recommend using the SAS.

National Percentile Rank (NPR)

The NPR shows which percentile the learner’s reading ability places them into, based on the national sample for their age.

Group rank and group size

The group rank allows you to measure the learner against the rest of the group in your school that has taken the test.

The group rank tells how the learner has performed, and the group size tells you how many other learners they are being measured against. For example, if a learner has a group rank of 8, and a group size of 15, this means that they came 8th out of 15 places, compared to the other learners that took the test.

Subskill group scores

To provide an accurate insight into your learners’ reading abilities, the questions within the Reading Test target a range of subskills which are key components of reading.

So that you can better understand your learners’ strengths and weaknesses within these subskills, they have been split into three groups for the purpose of the report:

• Direct meaning. This covers explicit retrieval and the ability to understand meaning in context.
• Indirect meaning. This covers implicit retrieval and how authorial choice of language influences meaning.
• Understanding overall meaning. This covers summary, intra- and intertextuality, and prediction.

For each of these three subskill groups, the report provides a set of scores:

• The number of below-level questions which were attempted/correct
• The number of at-level questions which were attempted/correct
• The number of above-level items which were attempted/correct