Listenwise Reading Assessments

We are excited to announce that Listenwise now offers the ability to assess students’ reading comprehension as well as listening comprehension! Built into the existing “Assign Quiz” assignment workflow, you can now decide which comprehension skill(s) to assess: Listening, Reading, or Listening & Reading. This article explains more about the new feature and how to use it. 

Selecting Literacy Skills to Assess

How to Find & Assign Reading Assessments

How to Review Reporting

The Student Experience

Selecting Literacy Skills to Assess

Now teachers have a choice about which literacy skills to assess on Listenwise. 

Comprehension quizzes can be used to assess listening comprehension, reading comprehension, or both. The comprehension quiz questions are the same for a given story, regardless of which skill(s) you are assessing. 

You may want to alternate listening and reading assessments, or you may choose to differentiate assessments by assigning different quiz types to individual students in the same class. For example, you may want to check listening comprehension with an audio story one week and reading comprehension using the transcript of another story the following week. Or you may want to assign some students a reading comprehension quiz, and ask others to take a reading & listening comprehension quiz, which provides more scaffolds for multilingual learners or striving readers, for example. Listening while reading is the most accessible option. 

You can always track which students have taken which type of comprehension quiz and how they are performing within and across skills. You can also assess students’ writing in response to written assignments using the new Writing Assessor. 

How to Find & Assign Reading Assessments

You can assess reading comprehension on any Listenwise lesson that has a quiz available. On the Assign Quiz page, there is now an option to choose “Comprehension Skill.” See this article for more about assigning quizzes.

If you choose “Reading,” students will see only the audio story’s transcript and be asked to answer questions based on reading the text. This is a new option to assess reading comprehension using the transcript as a printed text. 

If you choose “Listening,” students will see only the audio player (with no transcript), and be asked to answer questions based on listening to the audio story. This option was previously called “quiz without listening supports.” 

If you choose “Listening & Reading,” students will see both the audio player and the transcript along with supports such as slowed audio and the Texthelp toolbar. This option was previously called “quiz with listening supports” and offers the most scaffolding for learners, allowing them to read and listen at the same time. 

How to Review Reporting

Since you can assess different comprehension skills on an individual quiz, we note on quiz reports whether students took a Listening, Reading, or Listening & Reading quiz. You can also filter quiz reports to drill down into the data by comprehension skill. 

And you can filter individual student reports by comprehension skill as well:

The Student Experience

If you assign a Listenwise reading comprehension quiz, students will only see the audio story’s transcript. No audio is available to listen to, and the students will not have access to the Texthelp toolbar because it offers a read-aloud option. 

After they finish reading the text, they will click Next and answer the questions – just like the listening quizzes that you and students are used to seeing!