Reading Leveling Assessments — Are They Really Worth It?

Recently, I got an email from one of the many great teachers in the network I work in: “Hey Berretta, can I pilot the STEP assessment next year?”

It reignited an old debate in my brain — are leveling assessments worth it? Reading leveling assessments — think DRA, F&P, STEP, etc — are probes that assign numerical or alphabetical values to a student to highlight his or her reading ability and (supposedly) inform a teacher’s instruction for these correctly-labeled students.

I love teaching literacy. In my current role, I have the privilege of overseeing literacy instruction in seven different schools in three different cities. And as much as I like literacy, I love math: so much so that I have a Fibonacci-numbers-inspired tattoo.

So I wanted my inaugural blog entry to incorporate some math in trying to try to answer the question I posed: are leveling assessments really worth it? Let’s get to it.

I’ll start with a reasonable estimate for how much time it takes to administer a reading leveling assessment to a student.

15 minutes. This is a conservative estimate. Often, these assessments can run 30 minutes or longer per student.

Let’s take that conservative estimate and multiply it by the number of students in an average classroom:

24. This was the size of my first class of 2nd graders, and a reasonable number based on a quick survey of some classrooms in the schools in which I work.

If we multiply 15 x 24, we get 360. Those 360 minutes represent a conservative estimate of the instructional time a teacher spends on leveling their entire class.

But we can’t stop there — teachers do these assessments several times each year. I polled a handful of teachers I know, and I came up with a reasonable number for our estimates here: 6 times per year.

Let’s do some more multiplication: 6 x 360. Now we’re up to 2180 — the total number of minutes of instructional time that are spent each year on finding the reading levels for a class of students.

That’s 2180 minutes (or: 2180/60 = 36 hours) of instructional time spent administering tests that will tell us which letter of the alphabet or which number from 1–80 or which STEP from 1–12 should be branded on each reader in a classroom.

150. That represents a conservative estimate of the number of words per minute an average reader can read aloud. If a teacher were to take those 2180 minutes that they spent leveling students and simply read great texts aloud to their students, they would read over 320,000 words to students over the course of the school year.

The average novel for an elementary school student contains 50,000 words, so more simple division leads us to this number:

6. The number of novels a teacher could read aloud to a class.

The average picture book contains around 1000 words. More simple division:

320. The number of picture books that could be read aloud.

And reading aloud is just one easy alternative for that instructional time. What if there 36 extra hours spent reading for pleasure, writing, discussing, practicing handwriting, learning spelling skills, or teaching students typing skills?

Thirty-six hours almost equal the amount of time spent in the average college course. Maybe our students could benefit from early exposure to Econ 104: Intro to Macroeconomics. I know I could have.

If it comes down to a simple value proposition, the question could be: What would be more beneficial to students’ literacy growth: more assessment or more teaching?

So is leveling worth it? It will take a few more posts to lay out a complete argument, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a better use of instructional time.