How to Read and Use the Leveling Assessment Data

The Leveling Assessment is designed to provide a quick snapshot of how students comprehend and apply their understanding across texts of varying complexity. Each student reads three short passages: one at their enrolled grade level, one grade level below, and one grade level above. Students answer eight multiple-choice questions for each passage.

The questions generally measure two areas:

• Background Knowledge/Comprehension: Familiarity with the topic of the text, including key details, events, ideas, and basic comprehension.
• Application Knowledge: A student’s ability to use what they understood from the text. Application questions may include: selecting evidence that supports a claim, determining why an author included a particular statement, or identifying textual evidence that supports an idea.

The assessment can help answer, “What support might this student need to access grade-level work?” It is not intended to answer, “What grade level does this student read at?”

Interpreting the Report

The report shows the percentage of questions answered correctly at each of the three grade levels, with results broken down by Background Knowledge and Application Knowledge.

It is important to look for patterns rather than a single score. Because students read a different passage at each level, performance may not increase or decrease consistently as text complexity changes. A student might perform well on the Grade 8 and Grade 10 passages but struggle with the Grade 9 passage because of the topic, vocabulary, background knowledge, or specific comprehension demands of that text.

For this reason, the Leveling Assessment does not assign a specific instructional reading level, Lexile level, or grade-level equivalent. It should be viewed as one data point that helps identify where a student may need additional support.

How to Read the Leveling Assessment Report - A Student Example

What does this example tell us?
This Grade 9 student’s performance does not follow a consistent progression across passage levels. The student demonstrated the strongest Background Knowledge/Comprehension performance on the Grade 9 passage (67%), while Application Knowledge was stronger on both the Grade 8 and Grade 10 passages (40%) than on the Grade 9 passage (20%).

How might a teacher use this data?
Rather than assigning the student to Grade 8 content based on the results, use the data as a signal to look more closely at the student’s needs. In this example, the inconsistent performance suggests that passage-specific information may have influenced the results and that additional data is needed. Without the background knowledge, a student was not able to comprehend the text to the level of skillful analysis. The teacher might review benchmark performance, classroom work, and other reading data to determine whether the student needs targeted support with comprehension, applying evidence, analysis, or other skills.

The Leveling Assessment helps identify patterns and potential areas for support; it should not be interpreted as a specific instructional reading level. Student reading capabilities change based on their domain knowledge, not just their reading skill development.

Using the Data for Instruction

Use the results to ask: Where does this student appear to need support?

• Lower Background Knowledge/Comprehension performance may indicate a need for support with vocabulary, building background knowledge, identifying key ideas and details, or monitoring comprehension.
• Lower Application Knowledge performance may indicate that the student understands the basic meaning of a text but needs support using that understanding to analyze ideas, make inferences, evaluate evidence, or support a response.
• Consistently strong performance across the passages suggests the student is successfully accessing increasingly complex text.
• Inconsistent results are a signal to look more closely, not necessarily to move a student to a different reading level.

Teachers can use this information alongside classroom performance, benchmark data, and other reading measures to determine the appropriate scaffolds and instructional supports students may need when engaging with grade-level content.

What Support Will Help This Student Access Grade-Level Text?

Use the results alongside other student data to select scaffolds that address the specific area of need while continuing to provide access to grade-level instruction.

If students need support with Background Knowledge/Comprehension:

• Integrate targeted Tier II/III Skills Lessons to explicitly teach or reinforce prerequisite reading skills.
• Pre-teach essential vocabulary, focus words, or key concept words using strategies such as Frayer Models, concept maps, morphology, and student-friendly definitions.
• Build relevant background knowledge before reading through visuals, brief texts (additional reading practice lessons), discussion, or connections to prior learning.
• Use supported reading routines such as choral reading, partner reading, chunking, and stopping for comprehension checks.
• Provide access to Immersive Reader and read-aloud supports when appropriate so decoding or fluency challenges do not prevent students from engaging with the content.

If students need support with Application Knowledge:

• Use graphic organizers to help students organize key ideas, evidence, relationships, and thinking before responding.
• Model analytical thinking through teacher think-alouds, then gradually release responsibility to students.
• Explicitly model how to make an inference, select relevant evidence, connect evidence to an idea, and explain reasoning.
• Use discussion and collaborative routines such as Think-Pair-Share, evidence sorts, and text-dependent questioning to allow students to rehearse their thinking before writing.
• Integrate targeted Direct Instruction and Skills Lessons when the data points to a specific skill students need to develop or strengthen.

For additional scaffolds and instructional strategies, reference the Best Practices page for routines that can be integrated before, during, and after reading to support comprehension, vocabulary development, analysis, and student engagement.

Remember, the goal of scaffolding is to provide students with the support they need to successfully access increasingly complex, grade-level text, not simply to replace grade-level text with easier content.