American Reading Company offers a unified, standards-based framework for student assessment and instruction, text leveling, and curriculum.
National Standards for Reading
The Independent Reading Level Assessment (IRLA) determines the level at which students can successfully decode, understand, analyze, and evaluate text without teacher support.
Students spend most of their time working without direct teacher support in text books, seat assignments, research projects, home reading, and high-stakes testing. It is essential that educators establish a student’s independent reading level as the baseline for planning instruction and charting student progress.
The IRLA finds the independent reading level of every student using:
- State standards (culled from a comprehensive review of state standards across the nation)
- National Reading Panel/No Child Left Behind elements of reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension)
- Leveling system for text (more than 75,000 titles have been hand-leveled from more than 250 publishers.)
- Standards for a successful academic reading lifestyle (students should be reading for at least an hour a day.)
Assessment Categories
The IRLA contains an assessment rubric for each level of the ABE leveling system. Each rubric incorporates the following categories.
Wide Reading and Motivation
- In-school reading investment and stamina building
- Home reading routines
- Reading across genres
Phonemic Awareness/Phonics/Word Solving Strategies
- Oral and aural segmentation
- Sequential phonics/decoding skills
Fluency
Vocabulary and Background Knowledge
- Sight words
- Literary and technical vocabulary
- Word structures and etymology
- Figurative language
- Domain-specific information
Comprehension of Informational and Literary Text
- Active reading strategies
- Basic understanding
- Interpretation
- Critical response
Leveling Guidelines
Leveling Guidelines provides information and support for teachers who are interested in learning to level the books in their classroom libraries. Learn more »
Alignment to Other Systems
The ABE levels correlate to levels of other commonly used leveling systems. Click here for details.
