Free Online Score Calculators

August means that most of us are gearing up for the school year to start. Each new school year brings new students who need to be screened for English as a Second Language and/or bilingual services. Screening begins with some type of Home Language Survey that parents fill out during registration. The next step typically involves an assessment of English language proficiency. As members of the WIDA Consortium, you likely use either the MODEL or W-APT to assess your new students' English language proficiency.

Occasionally I run into educators who are unaware of the free online score report calculators that WIDA offers. By using these online score calculators, you can expect to save a great deal of time and trouble.
By simply filing in a few data fields, the calculators do the hard work of converting raw scores and calculating students' composite proficiency levels (CPLs). They will calculate speaking, listening, reading and writing scores along with the student's CPL and a grade-adjusted CPL. The calculators work for grades 1-12. At this time, they cannot be used to calculate kindergarten scores.

As you can imagine, this can be a real time saver, especially when you have dozens of students to assess.
Below are static screen shots of the W-APT score calculator and the MODEL score calculator. Click on the images below to be taken directly to the live score calculator. Once you get there, I would suggest bookmarking the site for future reference.

As you can see, the first drop down menu is for the student's current grade. Once you make that selection, additional data fields appear.

 

If you administer the MODEL assessment, keep in mind that there is a MODEL Score Tracker spreadsheet available on the Training Toolkit CD-ROM in each MODEL kit. This spreadsheet is an optional tool to help you store and track MODEL results for each student locally. Over time, it will assist you in analyzing students' progress. The Training Toolkit CD-ROM also includes user instructions and an example completed spreadsheet.

Happy screening!

 

Written by: Tammy King

Images: Freedigitalphotos.net and WIDA Consortium