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Early Numeracy Assessments

by Jana Bennett

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Effective Early Numeracy Assessment Measures

Because numeracy skills are so imperative to learn in the first few years of a child’s schooling, early assessment is pivotal in grades K-1. We know that acquiring a sense of numbers and numeracy skills is essential to a child’s later understanding and performance in mathematics and critical thinking. But how do we go about accurately assessing such early skills?

A Basis for Early Numeracy Assessments

Students in kindergarten and early grade one possess several informal math skills, such as the ability to:

  • Identify numbers
  • Count
  • Discriminate between quantities
  • Formulate mental number lines

To assess every student’s proficiency with these skills, and to identify the students who are experiencing numeracy difficulties and require intervention, educators need an assessment tool with numeracy measures that feature high sensitivity to growth.

Individually Administered Early Numeracy Measures

The aimswebTMPlus assessment system uses a standardized set of math measures – a mix of curriculum-based measures (CBM) and standards-based assessments (SBA) – that are designed to universally screen (benchmark) an entire classroom at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year.

CBMs are also designed and used to frequently monitor the progress of students identified as at-risk of academic failure.

The early numeracy component to aimswebPlus is comprised of seven individually administered math measures – most only taking one minute to complete – that are specifically developed for students in grades K-1:

  • Kindergarten: Number Naming Fluency (NNF) Measure
  • Kindergarten: Quantity Total Fluency (QTF) Measure
  • Kindergarten: Quantity Difference Fluency (QDF) Measure
  • Kindergarten & Grade One: Concepts & Applications (CA) Measure
  • Grade One: Number Comparison Fluency–Pairs (NCF–P) Measure
  • Grade One: Math Facts Fluency–1 Digit (MFF–1D) Measure
  • Grade One: Math Facts Fluency–Tens (MFF–T) Measure

All early numeracy measures, except for concepts & applications, are one-minute timed measures that assess a student’s fluency in foundational math skills. The CA measure is an untimed, standards-based measure – delivered in both kindergarten and grade one – that has students mentally solve various types of math problems and state the correct answers.

Fast Online Scoring

Assessing early numeracy measures with aimswebPlus allows educators to seamlessly score every student online. As each measure is scored, student data is available immediately – empowering educators to identify which students are performing at grade level and which students need differentiated instruction to close the learning gap before it’s too late.

To learn more about these early numeracy measures, and all of the aimswebPlus capabilities, get in touch with us today. Discover how our all-in-one benchmarking and progress monitoring system can help your district make more effective and efficient instructional decisions in grades K-8.