Finding the reports

This page shows you where a student’s Critical Reading Journeys (CRJ) reports live and what each page means. Reading a report takes about two minutes once you know the layout, and this page is the layout.

Here are a few words you will see on this page. The Reading Buddy is the conversation partner on the screen that asks your student questions about a story. Every finished story gives you a report, a one-page summary of how the student handled it, and a transcript, the full conversation between the student and the Reading Buddy. A grade band is the set of 36 stories for one grade level. The progress page is the page that shows one student’s ratings across all their stories.

Opening a student’s reports

From your student list, click Open next to the student’s name. The page that opens is that student’s home in your account. Across the top it shows the student’s name, their grade band, the story they are on now, and how many of the 36 stories they have finished.

Three tabs run below that. Progress Dashboard is the progress page, one view of everything the student has done. Detailed Reports lists the stories one by one, with a report and a transcript for each. Edit Student Account is where you change the student’s name, username, password, or grade band.

A report is ready a few minutes after a student finishes a story. The Reading Buddy’s last message closes the conversation, and the report is written from the transcript right after that. If you look the same hour, it is there.

The progress page

The progress page has four charts, one for each of the four measures. Each chart has rows for levels 1 through 4 and a column for every story in the grade band, numbered 1 to 36 in the order the student reads them. When a student finishes a story, its column fills up to the level the student reached. Hold the mouse over a story number to see its title.

Each measure watches one thing. Critical Thinking Phase Independence watches how much help the student needed to get through the conversation; a high level means the Buddy rarely had to ask twice. Text Evidence Usage watches whether the student backs up what they say with words from the story. Analytical Thinking Sophistication watches how much the student notices about how the story is built. Evaluative Thinking Sophistication watches the quality of the student’s judgments and the reasons behind them. Page 4, The four phases, explains where each one comes from.

Read the charts as a trend for one student. Four levels across 36 stories gives you a lot of detail, and the charts are built to show a student against their own earlier stories. Look for the direction each measure is moving, and for the one moving slowest. They are not built for comparing one student to another, and a student who started at level 2 and reached level 3 has done more than a student who started at level 4 and stayed there.

Standards

Below the charts are the Common Core reading standards for the student’s grade band. Each standard has a name, its code, and its full wording, so you do not have to look anything up.

Nothing shows until the fourth story. Until then, every standard says Not enough data, and a note on the page says why. After the fourth story, each standard is marked Developing or Proficient. A standard is marked Proficient when the student’s levels on the measure behind it, across their last four stories, average 3 or higher.

If your state does not use Common Core, the standards on this page still describe what the student did; they just carry a code your state does not use. The Reading the Reports guide has a short section on reading them against other state standards.

Detailed reports

Click the Detailed Reports tab to see the stories one at a time. The list shows all 36 stories in the student’s grade band, each marked completed, in progress, or not started, with two buttons: View report and Open transcript.

View report opens the report for that story. It has four sections, one for each measure. Each section gives a short paragraph describing what the student did, usually a quotation from the student’s own answers as an example, and the level the student reached on that measure, from 1 to 4, with a one- or two-word label such as Strong Independence or Consistent. The story’s title at the top of the report is a link to the transcript.

Open transcript shows the whole conversation. The story is on the left, so you can see what the student was looking at, and the conversation is on the right, with the date the student read the story. Every question the Reading Buddy asked and every answer the student gave is there, word for word. Where the Buddy asked the same thing a second time, you are seeing the student get help; where the student moved on after one answer, you are seeing them do it alone.

For the first few stories, read the transcript before the report. The report tells you the level; the transcript tells you why. A student’s first story is a student learning a new kind of conversation, and the transcript shows you that in a way the ratings cannot. After a few stories, the report is usually enough, and the transcript is where you go when a level surprises you.

Where to go next

Page 4, The four phases, explains the four stops a student moves through in every story and how each one connects to the four measures. The Reading the Reports guide walks through one student’s four stories and gives two things to try in class for each measure.