An exciting suite of standardised diagnostic tests, enabling an in-depth, individual assessment of a pupil’s decoding and comprehension skills.

The York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension: Early Reading and Passage Reading Primary (YARC Primary) enables teachers, SENCOs and learning support teachers to assess their pupils’ reading from the foundations of phonics to continuous prose reading achieved at the end of primary. It is ideal for following up at an individual level after group testing and, although the two tests take only about 20 minutes, a remarkable amount of invaluable diagnostic information can be gathered, covering a wide range of reading skills.

YARC Primary can also be used for assessing for Access Arrangements at Key Stage 2, providing two key measures for this purpose – reading accuracy and reading rate. The fully standardised assessment is split into two tests; early reading and passage reading, which can be purchased individually or as part of the Complete Set.

Early Reading

The Early Reading suite comprises four short tests specifically designed for 4 to 7 year-olds or older children with reading difficulties. The tests include:

• Letter Sound Knowledge
• Early Word Recognition
• Sound Deletion
• Sound Isolation

These tests assess a child’s phonological skills, alphabetic knowledge and word reading in a time-efficient and flexible way. They are among the most sensitive type of assessments for beginner readers and may be administered as a set or in different combinations up to three times during a school year, or at key points during a period of learning or intervention.

Passage Reading

Comprising both fiction and non-fiction texts, the passage reading test has been developed to assess the accuracy, rate and comprehension of oral reading skills in children between 5 to 11 years 11 months. A version of GL Assessment’s Single Word Reading Test (SWRT) is also included and can be administered in just a couple of minutes to determine which passages to give to an individual pupil.

The test assesses a pupil’s decoding and sight reading ability, their reading fluency and how well they understand what they have read. The questions that are linked to each passage demand the use of deduction and inference (cohesive device, knowledge-based and elaborative) to arrive at the answers, giving teachers essential information about their pupils’ skills beyond that of straightforward retrieval of information.

Why use YARC Primary?

• The YARC Primary Complete Set offers a continuous and seamless assessment of reading from age 4 to 11, providing a remarkable amount of diagnostic information
• It has been developed by the Centre for Reading and Language at the University of York, one of the UK’s leading centres for research into the nature and causes of reading and language difficulties
• It is ideal as a follow-up assessment at individual level, for those pupils who are identified as requiring further intervention after group testing
• YARC Primary is an ideal tool for assessing reading (decoding) and comprehension skills in pupils with English as an Additional Language, particularly as comprehension difficulties, may be more prevalent amongst these pupils
• The tests in the Early Reading suite are especially useful for identifying underlying difficulties in phonological awareness and the acquisition of letter sounds that could hamper progress in reading
• It provides standard age scores, age equivalent scores and percentile ranks for pupils aged 4 to 11 years 11 months, to help you benchmark your pupils’ reading and measure progress.

YARC Primary comes with a free online Score Conversion Tool that allows teachers and practitioners to input pupil details and raw scores and instantly receive a single page report with standard scores and percentile ranks for each part of YARC Primary that has been administered.

Contents

Early Reading Set contains:
Early Reading Test Material, Early Reading Manual, Early Reading Record Forms (10).

Passage Reading Set contains:
Passage Reading Test Material, Passage Reading manual, Passage Reading Record Forms (10).

Both of these sets are contained in the YARC Primary Complete Set.

Take a look at the YARC Assessment Overview