Coming Soon | Coming Soon

Bedrock's groundbreaking reading test

Bedrock’s new reading test will capture the complexity of reading in an easy-to-administer test, giving teachers valid, accurate, nationally-benchmarked information on their learners’ reading abilities.

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Assessing reading is hard. So we've worked hard to support you in doing it.

Our mission is to provide educators and learners with everything needed for literacy development in one central hub. A key piece of that puzzle is a reading test. So we've spent over a year working with Cambridge University and leading experts in reading and assessment to create a brand new one.

Launching in the Autumn term. Register now!

Bedrock's innovative new reading test will be available to schools in the Autumn term. It can be added to your existing Bedrock subscription, either as an add-on or as part of your subscription tier's package.

To be one of the first schools to access the new assessment, or for more information, complete the adjacent form and a member of our team will be in touch ASAP.

Watch: Bedrock's approach to assessing reading

Reading is one of the most complex things that we as humans are able to do. Any assessment to evaluate a learner’s ability to read must go through rigorous testing and validation to ensure results are valid, reliable and impactful.

That’s exactly the approach Bedrock has taken with the development of our reading test, working alongside Cambridge University and leading professors in reading to create an effective assessment framework.

Bedrock's Director of Education and Head of Assessment sat down to discuss our approach to assessment and learning...

Administering assessments is so time-consuming

At Bedrock we are committed to making teachers' lives easier, which drove how we designed the reading tests. They are easy to schedule, easy to administer, all within the familiar Bedrock ecosystem. No access codes, no lost time, no faff.
A one-size-fits-all test just doesn't fit!

Bedrock's reading test adapts to fit each learner. The assessment is driven by our adaptive algorithm. Questions automatically adapt based on each learner’s previous responses.
A learner's reading age is not the whole picture

Bedrock's reading test provides multiple key data points to monitor progress and the impact of interventions, including a Standardised Age Score (SAS), a reading age, learner rankings, as well as other metrics.
How can I be confident results are accurate?

Valid. Accurate. Benchmarked. That is our mantra for data at Bedrock. Analysis of test results is standardised on thousands of learners nationally, ensuring the data is valid and accurate.
I need results that reflect the curriculum's requirements

Bedrock's reading test is aligned to the curriculum. What's more, reading is assessed via a range of text types that is reflective of the texts learners will meet in the curriculum

One test. Multiple sub-skills tested.

Retrieval (explicit)

Assessing a learner's ability to understand information explicitly presented in the text

Retrieval (implicit)

Assessing a learner's ability to understand information not explicitly presented in the text via inference

Meaning

Assessing a learner's ability to understand the specific meanings of words and phrases in context

Evidencing ideas

Assessing a learner's ability to understand how authorial intent is communicated by language choice

Summary

Assessing a learner's ability to understand the overall meaning of a paragraph or text

Predictions

Assessing a learner's ability to use understanding of what has happened in a text to predict what will happen next

Inter & Intratextuality

Assessing a learner's ability to use understanding of overall text structure and argumentation to make comparisons within or across texts

Types of reading

Reading types are typically divided into local vs global reading (that is, at sentence level vs passage level) and into careful vs expeditious reading (that is, reading in detail vs reading for a particular purpose). This is sometimes known as scanning / skimming / search reading.

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Text types

Bedrock's reading test targets a range of text types to reflect the reality of texts that candidates will be exposed to both in and beyond the classroom. These text types were arrived at in collaboration with teachers and span a range of challenges through different levels of lexico-grammatical complexity, discourse mode and level of abstraction.

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Response format

Each question type has been designed to meet a particular element of our Reading Skills Framework, to activate a particular type of reading and to suit selected text types. Questions appear in a range of objective response formats to target the most appropriate way of activating the underlying subskill: 4-option multiple choice; 5-option multiple choice; sorting, ordering and summary completion.

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Test adaptivity and item banking

Bedrock's reading test uses a fully adaptive test administration mechanism to allow accurate assessment of reading ability in a short period of time. After each question is answered by the candidate, the adaptive algorithm selects another from a substantial bank which is most appropriate for the level of the learner.

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Created by experts in reading and assessment

The ultimate goal of reading is for comprehension, so that we can read for enjoyment and to learn. Reading comprehension needs will present a barrier to learning so it is crucial that we use robust assessment approaches that allow us to identify reading comprehension needs.

Jessie Ricketts

Professor, Royal Holloway University of London, Reading & Language Development