Comparing Early Literacy Screening Assessment Benchmarks in Massachusetts

Beginning with the 2020-21 school year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education began collecting literacy screening assessment data from schools and districts participating in certain state grants in order to analyze patterns of performance to inform improvement efforts. These assessments, which were selected from a list of state-approved screener products, vary in how they were designed, how they are administered, and how they define risk of reading difficulty, making it difficult to compare and summarize performance for students in different schools and districts. However, grade 3 students do take one common assessment: the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) English Language Arts (ELA) assessment. MCAS therefore provides a mechanism to compare literacy benchmarks using a common metric. This issue brief describes what it means to be "at risk" of reading difficulty as defined by each screening assessment and then provides results of a study that links screener benchmark scores to the MCAS grade 3 scale.