TRC (Text Reading and Comprehension) is an assessment in which books are “leveled” from A to Z based on difficulty. The goal of the assessment is to identify a student’s “just right” book level (known as the “instructional reading level”), which is the level where books are easy enough for a student to read with a high level of comprehension, but also difficult enough to be challenging. TRC includes both “benchmark” assessments, given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, and “progress monitoring” assessments, given at more frequent intervals to struggling students, to track growth throughout the year. Progress monitoring assessments are a bit tricky to interpret, because they often conclude with a book that was too easy (“independent”) or too hard (“frustrational”), such that the just right (“instructional”) level is not actually known.
In this design, I adapted our conventional “aim line” graph (used in DIBELS) so that it would be able to accommodate assessment outcomes that represent only a floor (“too easy” – the open upward triangles) or a ceiling (“too hard” – the downward solid triangles) on the student’s reading level.