Academic Testing 101

When your child is facing academic challenges, it may feel like you need to learn an entirely new language. Different tests, acronyms, scoring... It’s daunting.

But knowledge is power. So from A-Z, here are the definitions of the basics in academic testing.

  • Basic Reading Skills require the application of letter sound knowledge to decode words along with automatic sight word recognition. Poor basic reading skills have been found to be particularly diagnostic of early difficulties in literacy as they contribute to a slow and laborious approach to reading and writing. Conversely, efficient basic reading skills better allow a student to focus cognitive energy on higher order comprehension.

  • Conventions are aspects of English writing (punctuation and abbreviations) that impart meaning in reading and writing, but do not typically pertain to spelling.

  • Long-term Storage and Retrieval is the “broad ability to store, consolidate and retrieve information over periods of time measured in minutes, hours, days and years.” This ability is important because it is a route to automaticity. With respect to academic achievement, the narrow ability of naming facility, also referred to as Rapid Automatic Naming and the narrow ability of Ideational Fluency, is strongly related to visual efficiency and speed, and is associated with reading fluency, the fluency aspect of written expression, and automatic recall of math facts. These tasks often include naming of letters, numbers, or other items while being timed.Description text goes here

  • Listening Comprehension refers to the understanding of explicit and implicit meanings of words and sentences of spoken language. It involves the active process of understanding of vocabulary and the syntax of sentences along with memory, attention, grammar, and comprehension monitoring. Students benefit from making connections to prior learning when listening to oral information.

  • Math Computation includes skills, along with processes, such as numeration, basic operations, fractions, decimals, and algebra.

  • Math Concepts and Applications focuses on reasoning and mathematical concepts and their application to meaningful problem solving. Skill categories may include number concepts, time and money, measurement, geometry, data investigation, and higher math concepts. Acquisition of math concepts is hierarchical in nature (learning basic concepts before more complex).

  • Math Fact Fluency is important as it measures the automaticity and accuracy to retrieve basic facts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division). Without automaticity to retrieve facts directly, students are likely to experience higher cognitive loads and produce work that is slow and inaccurate.

  • Oral Expression is the ability to convey wants, needs, thoughts, and ideas meaningfully using appropriate syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic structures.

  • Oral Language refers to the capacity to understand and communicate spoken language and serves as the foundation for learning to read and write. Children continue to learn language beyond early childhood, well into adolescence and adulthood. Expressive language skill is the ability to generate written or spoken communication that clearly reflects one’s information or intentions. Receptive language skill is the ability to comprehend the deeper meanings and details of communication. Oral language difficulties can manifest in a child’s ability to follow multi-step directions in class or to follow lengthy content area discussions without visuals. It may take a child longer to answer questions and they may experience difficulty working with a group or socializing with peers due to difficulty following rapidly switching conversation topics. Academically, a child may demonstrate a pattern and history of difficulty with tasks involving integrated language (i.e., reading comprehension, written expression, math reasoning), regardless of subject area and despite solid basic academic skills (i.e., decoding, spelling, math computation).

  • Orthographic Processing refers to one’s ability to perceive, process, and generate written language. With respect to reading, orthographic processing underlies accurate and automatic recall of correct sequences of letters for decoding and sight-word memorization as well as recognition and understanding of conventions such as punctuation marks and capitalization. Orthographic processing challenges impact writing when individuals struggle to master regular and irregular spelling patterns and rules for punctuation, capitalization, and other mechanical elements of writing. Weaknesses limit both accuracy and efficiency as the need to remember rules for reading and writing, rather than employing them automatically, contributes to a slow pace of work and increased exhaustion as academic demands increase. In the area of math, difficulty with orthographic processing may impact the ability to accurately perceive numbers and math symbols, as well as confusion with number sequence.

  • Phonological Awareness is the ability to detect and manipulate the sound structure at the word, syllable, and phoneme level, including the ability to identify, isolate, blend, substitute, rhyme, and analyze speech sounds. Phonological awareness relates only to speech sounds, not to alphabet letters, so alphabet knowledge is unnecessary to develop phonological awareness of language. Importantly, the development of phonological awareness has been found to be a reliable predictor of a child’s reading and spelling ability. Individuals with poor phonological awareness/processing have difficulty hearing the internal structure of sound in words that can directly be linked to difficulties with decoding and spelling.

  • Reading Comprehension involves the processing of text while simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. Learning to read requires close coordination between the brain’s language processing and visual recognition systems. Literal comprehension requires the recognition or recall of ideas, information, or events that are explicitly stated in the text and does not typically require outside knowledge from the reader. Inferential comprehension requires readers to tap into a bank of acquired vocabulary and a more sophisticated understanding of syntax while accessing their prior memories to relate to multiple concepts, evaluate the viewpoint of the writer, and/or formulate a personal interpretation of the material.

  • Reading Fluency is a critical component for skilled reading. It not only involves automatic word recognition and efficient decoding but the application of prosody (intonation, phrasing, and rhythm) at the phrase, sentence, and text levels. Fluent readers understand text structure, use their decoding skills to move quickly through material, have a good knowledge of vocabulary, and make connections to their own background knowledge. They maintain their performance for long periods of time while reading text and comprehending simultaneously. Students who struggle to read fluently use much of their cognitive energy to read unknown text, affecting their ability to ultimately comprehend what they read.

  • Reading Vocabulary is developed when students learn new words directly through instruction and indirectly through reading, listening, and having conversations with others. Vocabulary is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension.

  • Spelling is closely linked to reading and writing because it involves breaking apart a spoken word into its sounds and encoding them into letters representing those sounds. It is not uncommon for students to restrict their writing to include words that they can only spell correctly. Ultimately, good spelling skills lead to rapid word recognition, higher level of composition, and comprehension. It is important to note that success in reading does not automatically result in success in spelling.

  • Writing Fluency includes accuracy, speed, and the writer's ability to convey messages in writing. Students that struggle to write fluently can find writing tasks exhausting as they exert much of their energy writing legibly, spelling words correctly, and punctuating appropriately. Students who write very slowly typically produce very little written work and often avoid or rush through writing assignments.

  • Written Expression involves communicating one’s knowledge or thoughts in a written product. One must write and organize thoughts while using appropriate detail, sequence, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, grammar, and composition.