What Sets Literably Apart?

What is Literably?

Literably is a digital early literacy assessment platform for grades K-8 that is designed to inform instruction, screen students for reading difficulties, and monitor students’ reading progress. 

Literably assessments support the 5 Pillars of Literacy: oral fluency, phonics, phonological awareness, comprehension, and vocabulary. 

Literably’s ORF assessment can be completed by a student, in class or at home, with or without a teacher (or parent) present. The ORF assessment captures a short passage read out loud by the student into a device (iPad, Chromebook, laptop, desktop) and the answers to five multiple-choice comprehension questions. A short retell is also made available for the teacher to review and grade. Literably reading passages contain both decodable and leveled texts.

How does Literably’s ORF assessment work

Students take the ORF assessments via a Chromebook, iPad, laptop, or desktop. Literably's trained graders along with speech recognition technology then grade the assessments and return the results to teachers within 24 hours. The assessment results are delivered via email and updated on the Literably teacher dashboard.

What does research say about Literably’s ORF assessment?

Decades of research have shown that teachers can learn a tremendous amount about their students by listening to (and analyzing) how they read.

More specifically, ever since Deno et al. (1980) demonstrated the remarkable correlation between a student’s speed at reading a passage and their achievement on standardized reading tests, a large body of research has demonstrated that ORF is a particularly effective tool for identifying struggling readers and measuring their progress. This effectiveness is confirmed in the technical documentation accompanying widely used oral reading assessments, such as the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (Good & Kaminski 2002) and Aimsweb (Howe & Shinn 2002).

Research led by a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education has shown that Literably’s ORF assessment can predict student performance on an end-of-year state reading test, with screening performance on par with traditional manually-administered reading assessments like DIBELS and Aimsweb.

Click here to access Literably’s technical manual, which has more information about the research that supports Literably’s design and effectiveness.

How does Literably help teachers and admins save time?

Literably saves teachers and admins time by grading student assessments and housing the data in an easy-to-use online dashboard. This valuable time can now be spent however teachers and admins deem most appropriate. This might include but is not limited to observing assessments, listening to student recordings, conferencing with students, analyzing student data, and instructing students.

What makes Literably objective?

Literably’s standardized grading methodology ensures that all students are graded in an objective manner.

Literably’s trained graders are normed to a common standard, so teachers and admins can feel confident that all student assessments receive reliable and consistent grading across all classrooms. All of Literably’s graders are continually evaluated to ensure that they maintain exceptional accuracy

In addition, Literably recently started using speech recognition to help score small portions of some running records. This new technology is being deployed primarily on the easiest-to-grade parts of some student recordings. 

Literably’s goal is to combine the expertise and human touch of its Literably graders with the efficiency of speech recognition, in order to produce extremely accurate results that are delivered to teachers and admins as quickly as possible.

How is Literably actionable?

Using their dashboards, teachers and admins can quickly sort and organize student data to spot trends, form reading groups, and drive instruction for individual students, subgroups of students, or whole classes. Teachers and admins can also review assessment results via Literably data exports.

With their dashboards, data exports, and other Literably tools, teachers and admins have student data centralized in one place - allowing them to easily analyze data and support students with targeted action plans that support student reading growth.

With Literably, students can take a Literably assessment on Monday morning and by Tuesday, teachers and admins can use the students’ graded assessment results to adjust reading groups and update their instruction to target the specific needs of their students.