Rapid Online Assessment of Reading

Language and Comprehension Suite Technical Manual

The ROAR Assessment Suites

ROAR consists of a collection of measures, each designed to tap into a critical aspect of reading. Each individual measure can be run independently and returns raw scores, standard scores, and percentiles relative to national norms. Additionally, measures are also grouped into measurement suites that comprehensively evaluate different constructs in reading development, and produce composite scores and risk indices.

ROAR Foundational Reading Skills Suite

The ROAR Foundational Reading Skills Suite provides efficient screening of the core decoding and word recognition skills that underlie reading development, including phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, word recognition, and sentence reading efficiency. These measures are designed to support early identification of students at risk for reading difficulties, including dyslexia.

ROAR Comprehension Suite

The ROAR Comprehension Suite provides efficient, automated assessments of the language comprehension component of reading ability — the skills needed to make meaning from text once words are recognized. The suite includes assessments of vocabulary, morphological knowledge, syntactic knowledge, and inferential reasoning. Results from the Comprehension Suite can help identify students who may benefit from additional instructional support in vocabulary, morphology, syntax, or inferential reasoning — areas that are critical for reading comprehension but may not be captured by foundational skills screening alone.

Together, the two suites allow educators and researchers to examine both the word recognition and language comprehension pathways described in Scarborough’s Reading Rope and related theoretical frameworks, providing a comprehensive picture of students’ reading development.

Acknowledgements

ROAR reflects the collective vision and dedication of an incredible team of collaborators. This work would not have been possible without the hundreds of teachers, reading specialists, school administrators, parents, and community based organizations that believed in the ROARmission and collaborated at each stage of ROAR research and development. We would like to specifically thank Ching-Pei Hu and Belmont-Redwood Shores School District for their partnership on early validation studies. Additionally, dozens of academics have made important contributions along the way including Ben Domingue, Joshua Lawrence, Mike Frank, Mika Braginsky, Kelly Wentzlof, Maya Brunton, Alby Ungashe, Tracy Li, and others. The ROAR Technical Manual used the quarto book template from Experimentology: An Open Science Approach to Experimental Psychology Methods with support from Mike Frank and Mika Braginsky.

ROAR would not have been possible without generous funding from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD095861), Advanced Educational Research and Development Fund (AERDF), Institute of Education Sciences, Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative, Microsoft, Stanford Impact Labs, Neuroscience:Translate, Klingenstein Foundation, Tools Competition.

© 2026 Jason D. Yeatman