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Health & Fitness

Demystifying Your Child's DRP Score

To meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind, the Connecticut Mastery Test is utilized to judge student performance in grades 3 through 8 statewide.

To meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) is utilized to judge student performance in grades 3 through 8 statewide. The Degrees of Reading Power (DRP) is a standardized reading assessment instrument included on the CMT. Each year parents receive a report detailing their child’s performance on this assessment. In addition, school systems throughout Connecticut publish scores in local newspapers. As an accountability measure for NCLB, performance on the DRP is crucial for the success of the school system, and each classroom in which it is administered.

The DRP Tests are group-administered assessments requiring students to read a variety of nonfiction paragraphs arranged from easy to difficult.  A unique aspect of this instrument is that it directly links student performance to readability of text material. Unlike traditional standardized measures, the DRP is designed to produce scores (DRP Units) which can be directly interpreted to the level of reading material students can read with a specified level of comprehension. According to the developer of the test, Touchstone Applied Science Associates (TASA), the Standard DRP is currently used in most states incorporating 10,000 school districts (J. Schlange, personal communication, February 21, 2007). Scores on the DRP are criterion referenced to describe the most difficult prose a student can comprehend. Norm-referenced scores are also offered for percentile ranks. 

In Connecticut, the DRP is group administered in grades three through eight as part of the Connecticut Mastery Test. A third or fourth-grade student taking this test would be instructed to read six non-fiction passages, while students in grades five through eight are required to read seven.  Each passage contains seven deleted words requiring students to replace each omitted word with one of five possible choices. All five choices offered make grammatical sense, therefore the student must be able to read and comprehend the passage to select the correct answer. The total number of multiple choice test items for a third or fourth grader is 42 and grades five through eight are required to complete 49. All children in Connecticut taking the DRP are limited to 45 minutes to complete the exam.

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The focus of the DRP is to measure how well prose is comprehended as it is read. The aspect of comprehension being assessed is referred to as the surface meaning of text. Surface meaning refers to grammar that is immediately discernible, as opposed to deep structure which, at the word level, can have two or more meanings. For example, “Harry wore a light suit” is structurally ambiguous since it can refer to either the color or weight of the suit in question. Therefore, designing the DRP according to surface meaning will eliminate grammatical ambiguities.

On the DRP, students select the correct word for each deletion in text from a list of five multiple choice options. All responses on the DRP are described as high-frequency words and semantically plausible. Therefore, in order to select the correct response, it is necessary to comprehend the surrounding text. Passage topics are selected at random from the universe of all prose subject matter utilizing the Encyclopedia Britannica as a taxonomy.

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Test performance on the DRP is converted to the same DRP units used to index the difficulty of books students are expected to read. Therefore, the same DRP units are also utilized to index the readability of prose material. For example, a DRP test score of 41 would indicate that a student would be expected to read and comprehend Frog and Toad are Friends, which also corresponds to a DRP readability Index of 41. A DRP test score of 50 would correspond to the book Charlotte’s Web, while a DRP score of 61 corresponds to Jane Eyre.  Although the DRP scale of readability ranges from zero to one hundred, text commonly encountered ranges from approximately thirty to eighty-five DRP units. One of the DRP objectives is the provision of information that will be useful in matching reading material with student ability. The DRP was designed with the dual objectives of yielding reading scores while providing the opportunity of matching the scores to appropriate reading material for each student.

 References

 Bormuth, J. R. (1970). On the Theory of Achievement Test Items

Connecticut State Department of Education (2005). Connecticut Mastery Test Fourth Generation Language Arts Handbook.

Cross, L. H. (1995). Review of the Degrees of Reading Power. In J. Close & J. Impara (Eds.), The Twelveth Mental Measurements Yearbook.

 Hanna, G. S. (1985). Review of Degrees of Reading Power. In J. Mitchell (Ed.), The Ninth Mental Measurements Yearbook

Koslin, B. L., Zeno, S., & Koslin, S. (1987). The DRP: An Effectiveness Measure in Reading.

TASA (2002). DRP: the Readability Standard

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