HARVEST — Free K–5 Reading Placement Test

What is HARVEST?

HARVEST is a free placement assessment for Kindergarten through Grade 5. It runs entirely in your browser and ends by naming the specific lesson your child should start with in the Faith Schooling curriculum. The reading check takes about 20 minutes. It is a starting-point finder, not a grade or a score to compare against other children.

What does it measure against?

Not a national average. HARVEST measures a child against the documented prerequisites of the Faith Schooling curriculum itself — the specific skills a lesson assumes a child already has. Every question maps to a skill in that sequence, so the result can point at a real lesson instead of a percentile.

The seven sections are separate on purpose. Reading is not one ability but several strands running together — sound, print, vocabulary and language comprehension — and a child can be secure in one while stalled in another (Scarborough, 2001). A single overall reading score hides exactly the thing a parent needs to see, so HARVEST reports the strands, and places on the weakest prerequisite rather than on the average. Phonemic awareness and decoding are checked before fluency because they are what fluency is built out of (National Reading Panel, 2000; Castles, Rastle & Nation, 2018); sight words are checked as instant recognition, which is what secure decoding eventually turns familiar words into (Ehri, 2005); and spelling is checked separately from reading because writing a word draws on the same phonics knowledge from the other direction and often exposes gaps reading conceals (Moats, 2020).

How is the starting point chosen?

The engine scores each domain, then walks the curriculum’s prerequisite map upward from the first Kindergarten unit. For each grade-and-quarter position it asks a single question: does this child meet every prerequisite this position assumes? The highest position where all prerequisites are met becomes the recommended starting point.

Where a child could reasonably be placed at more than one position, HARVEST takes the lower one — reasonable confidence over ambition. If reading and math point at different levels, the lower of the two sets the primary placement, because a child needs the reading to access the higher-grade word problems.

Curriculum level is not the same as grade level

HARVEST returns a place in a teaching sequence, not a verdict on your child. A child in second grade may begin partway through the Grade 1 material in one subject and above their grade in another, and that is a normal, useful result — it tells you where teaching should start so the next lesson is neither wasted nor overwhelming.

How confident is the result?

Every session carries a confidence score. It starts at 100 and is reduced by things that genuinely make a result less trustworthy: inconsistent answering, recorded parent help, interruptions, fatigue patterns, and signs of guessing. 90–100 is high confidence, 75–89 moderate, and anything below 75 is flagged for a human to review rather than acted on automatically. The report always shows the band, and a margin of error around it.

How is remediation identified?

A blocked prerequisite is the answer: if a position is out of reach, the report names the specific skill standing in the way rather than lowering the whole placement silently. Naming the blocking skill is the point — a child who is behind in reading does not usually catch up by being given more of everything, but by being taught the particular thing that is missing, and the earlier that is identified the smaller the gap stays (Torgesen, 2004). HARVEST also watches for patterns that change what you should teach — a child who reads patterns they cannot yet spell, a child whose word-problem errors are vocabulary rather than arithmetic, or handwriting that is slow enough to depress written answers and disguise what the child knows.

How does a child advance? What does 90% across five sessions mean?

Placement gets a child started; mastery decides movement after that, and it is measured inside the curriculum rather than by HARVEST. A skill counts as mastered when a child demonstrates it at 90% or better across five or more sessions on different days.

Both halves of that rule matter. The 90% sets the standard high enough that the next lesson is safe to build on. The five sessions on different days are what separate a good day from durable learning — one strong worksheet can come from a fresh morning, a familiar page, or a helpful hint, and none of those prove the skill will still be there next month. Spreading the evidence across days, with parallel forms so a retest is not the same questions, is what makes it dependable. A child who has not reached it simply gets more practice; the calendar does not push them on.

To be exact about where that rule comes from: the 90% and the five sessions are our standard, not a figure lifted from a study. The reasoning behind them is not ours. Practice should be taken to a high success rate before a child is moved on, and learning should be checked again after time has passed rather than only in the lesson that taught it — both are long-standing findings in the instruction research (Rosenshine, 2012). We set the threshold where we did because early reading skills are the foundation everything later is built on, and a shaky foundation is expensive to repair (National Reading Panel, 2000; Torgesen, 2004). A different curriculum could reasonably choose a different number.

What parents do with the result

Open the recommended lesson and teach it. The report names the starting point, what is already strong, what to watch, and the specific skills to shore up first. Re-running HARVEST after about eight weeks shows growth; day-to-day movement is tracked by the mastery checks inside the curriculum, not by retaking the placement.

What HARVEST does not claim

Being clear about this matters more to us than sounding impressive:

• It is not a standardized or nationally normed test. It does not compare your child to a national sample and it produces no percentile or grade-equivalent score.
• It is not a diagnostic or clinical assessment. It cannot identify dyslexia, ADHD, a learning disability, or any other condition, and it is not a substitute for evaluation by a qualified professional. If something here concerns you, take it to one.
• It is not an IQ or ability test. It measures specific taught skills, not capacity.
• Its reliability study is not finished. Internal-consistency and test–retest figures are planned and not yet collected, so the engine reports a deliberately conservative margin of error. We would rather say that than imply evidence we do not have.
• It does not replace your judgment. You watched your child learn to read. A twenty-minute check is a second opinion, not a verdict — and a low-confidence result is explicitly handed back to you to decide.

Four different things, often confused

• Placement assessment (this) — once, at the start: where do we begin?
• Ongoing mastery checks — continuously, inside the lessons: has this skill stuck? (the 90%-across-five-sessions rule)
• Curriculum progress — how far through the sequence you have taught.
• Standardized or diagnostic testing — comparison against a norm group, or identification of a condition. Faith Schooling does neither.

See the curriculum this places into, the FAQ, or how we teach and check work.

Sources

These support the reasoning behind how placement and mastery are decided. They are not evidence about HARVEST itself — its own reliability study is not finished, as stated above.

• National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. NICHD.
• Scarborough, H. S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Vol. 1, pp. 97-110). Guilford Press. (The reading rope.)
• Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167-188. (Orthographic mapping - how words become instantly recognisable.)
• Torgesen, J. K. (2004). Avoiding the devastating downward spiral: The evidence that early intervention prevents reading failure. American Educator, 28(3), 6-19.
• Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5-51.
• Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (3rd ed.). Brookes Publishing.
• Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator, 36(1), 12-19.

HARVEST runs entirely in your browser. There is nothing to set up and no upload step. Your child’s answers, the scoring, and the final report all live on your device — they never leave it.

If you want the report saved, you print or download the PDF. If you want it gone, close the browser tab and the local storage clears when you ask it to. We do not see, store, or transmit any of it.

Built for families. Owned by families.

HARVEST is the placement tool for Faith Schooling’s full K–5 curriculum line. Phonics, Decoding, and Early Fluency (the Faith Readers K–5 reading curriculum) and Building Number Sense (Faith Thinkers K–5 math) are available now, and your HARVEST result plugs directly into the recommended starting point in each — no retesting required.

Take it once. Keep the report. Use it to start in the right place today.