The BAS should only be administered to students three times a year (September, January, May).
We use this assessment to make student groups, plan instruction, and help identify students for reading intervention. To keep this assessment valid, it’s important that we administer it following these guidelines.

Universal coding will help us analyze reading records easily. These are the most common types of errors. If a student substitutes a word, it is an error every time. If the word is a proper noun, it is only an error the first time, even if they repeat the error multiple times. Contractions count as only one error, whether a student combines two words (read “it’s” for it is), or reads a contraction as two words (“it is” for it’s). Repetitions and self-corrections do not count as errors. Check the back cover of your assessment guide for more examples of universal coding.

Remember that the fluency rubric focuses on phrasing and expression, and not speed. What we are watching for is students reading text in a way that leads to deep comprehension.

This may be the most difficult part of the BAS! Students are expected to share their understandings mostly unprompted. Your role is to observe and record. Ask each prompt and record the student’s responses. You may ask the student to elaborate only once (probe). Use the rubric for the appropriate text level to evaluate the responses.

Finding three levels (by listening to a student read 3 texts) ensures the validity of the assessment. We want to teach students at their highest instructional level, and that is why we must push on until a hard level is reached.

Your reading specialist can help you in the following ways:
-Administer BAS to students
-Teach an ELA lesson so you have time to administer BAS
-Help you analyze BAS data for grouping students and planning instruction