Click here to review the Excutive Summary of the Field Study of Reliability and Validity of the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment Systems 1 and 2.

In 1996, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell revolutionized classroom teaching with their systematic approach to small-group reading instruction as described in their groundbreaking text, Guided Reading. Over the years Fountas and Pinnell have brought their systematic, critical sensibility to all areas of classroom practice through publications like Guiding Readers and Writers and Teaching for Comprehending and Fluency. Teachers worldwide recognize in these publications the authors' deep understanding of classroom realities and their respect for the challenges facing teachers.

With the all-new Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System, the authors respond to the demands teachers and administrators have expressed over the years. Specifically, Fountas and Pinnell:

• Recognized the need for a comprehensive assessment system that is intimately and gracefully linked to classroom instruction
• Recognized the absence of a reliable and specific system for matching students' instructional and independent reading abilities to the comprehensive Fountas and Pinnell A-Z text gradient
• Recognized that existing systems for assessing reading lacked the kind of detailed and quantifiable assessment of reading comprehension that is crucial to truly understanding children
• Recognized that this essential piece was missing from their systematic support for literacy instruction.

Developed by the authors in response to these demands, the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System is every bit as revolutionary as Guided Reading was in 1996 and reflects the same exquisite quality and attention to critical aspects of teaching and learning. Specific features of the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System enable you to:

• Determine your students' independent and instructional reading levels
• Group students for reading instruction
• Select texts that will be productive for a student's instruction
• Assess the outcomes of teaching
• Assess a new student's reading level for independent reading and instruction
• Identify students who need intervention and extra help
• Document student progress across a school year and across grade levels
• Create class profiles
• Inform parent conferences.

• 58 newly created high-quality books have been written expressly for the purposes of literacy assessment along the Fountas and Pinnell text gradient A-Z.
• Each book was developed under the careful direction and supervision of Fountas and Pinnell according to their strict leveling protocols.
• To further ensure proper leveling, Fountas and Pinnell asked a team of experienced classroom teachers to vet each book, and Heinemann conducted a formal field study of the leveling that involved a broad spectrum of students across the U.S.

• Recording Forms guide teachers through an assessment protocol that reveals a wealth of information about the reader, including the reader's accuracy and self-corrections, comprehension, and fluency.
• An innovative Comprehension Conversation is part of the assessment protocol at every level and provides details about a reader's thinking within and beyond the text at levels A-K; and within, beyond, and about the text at levels J-Z.
• Optional assessments allow teachers to gather further details when necessary to more precisely pinpoint a reader's needs.

• The Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System includes a copy of Fountas and Pinnell's A Continuum of Literacy Learning. This tool helps teachers link the results of the assessment to their teaching to ensure students' growth as learners.

• User-friendly CDs and the new F&P Calculator/Stopwatch provide teachers with time-saving options for printing out forms, managing student data, and calculating scores.
• The Professional Development DVD presents video models of teachers implementing the assessment, opportunities for coding and scoring practice, and data-analysis discussions.