One of the greatest challenges community-based afterschool program staff face is choosing appropriate books for students to read, books that are challenging enough for a student to make progress, but not so hard that they will become frustrated. 

The Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI) assessment takes the guess work out of this process and allows program staff to easily determine a student’s reading level by having the student take a computer-adaptive test that adapts to students ability, adjusting the difficulty of each question until the student is precisely matched to a Lexile reading level. SRI also encourages parental involvement by generating a list of developmentally appropriate books for families to take to their area library or book store.  It also generates reports that contain helpful suggestions to engage parents in their child’s learning and help them to become better readers. 

Once a student has chosen and read an appropriate Lexile leveled book, they then take a quiz on Scholastic Reading Counts (SRC) based on the book they’ve read to assess their comprehension of the material they’ve just read.  SRC has developed a library of thousands of quizzes that ask questions based upon the book the student has read.  These quizzes assess key components of comprehension: sequence, inference, and predicting outcomes to determine whether or not the student truly understood the content of the story.  These tools provide consistent progress monitoring as the SRI assessment is retaken three additional times throughout the year to gauge student growth.
 

Wireless Neighborhoods Remote Desktop (broken link)
http://reading.wireless-neighborhoods.org/tsweb/Default.htm