Capti Assess is powered by ETS ReadBasix, one of the most advanced and researched diagnostic assessments in the market. To fully appreciate the depth and academic importance of this product, we briefly review the history of ReadBasix.
The R&D of ReadBasix was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305F100005 to the Educational Testing Service (ETS) as part of the Reading for Understanding Research (RFU) Initiative, as well as IES Grants R305G040065 and R305A150176. The R&D of Capti Assess was supported by Grants 91990021C0029 and 91990019C0024.
Capti Assess with ReadBasix is supported by a strong foundation of research, beginning with SARA (the Study of Adult Reading Acquisition) by Dr. John Sabatini. Dr. Sabatini is currently a Distinguished Research Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis. He has been researching adult and adolescent literacy since the late 1990s. He spent several years at the National Center for Adult Literacy and has been involved in numerous domestic and international literacy projects, including the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).
In 2004, Dr. Sabatini joined the Educational Testing Service and began working to create the RISE (Reading Inventory and Scholastic Evaluation) assessment, the predecessor to ETS ReadBasix. This work was spurred by a collaboration with the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), a group that works closely with numerous school districts across the U.S. Those school districts noted that many of their middle school students were arriving at 6th grade with weak reading skills, but the schools were not equipped to identify exactly where their weaknesses were—or what to do about them. RISE was initially designed specifically for middle school students, to give schools the information they needed to help struggling readers. The project was funded by grants from SERP, Carnegie, and Lila Wallace.
One of the first large-scale administrations of the RISE battery occurred in a school district in Massachusetts in 2007. This allowed the battery to be field tested for the first time with students in entire middle schools.
In 2010, ETS was awarded an assessment grant under the Reading for Understanding Initiative funded by IES at the U.S. Department of Education. This funding allowed for the expansion of the assessment to include more grade levels including elementary school starting from grade 3 and high school.
The field tests expanded in 2012 to include a large district in Maryland. The tests allowed ETS and the SERP Institute to refine RISE based on user feedback and analysis the the data. In 2016, the team performed a national norming study in grades 3-12, after which the RISE evolved into its current form under the name ETS ReadBasix, officially distributed as part of the Capti Assess product.
In 2018, Capti partnered with ETS to bring ReadBasix to market. Capti integrated ReadBasix into its Capti Assess platform and iteratively tested and improved the product. In 2020, Capti became the official ETS distributor and made Capti Assess with ETS ReadBasix available for sale. Today, Capti Assess with ETS ReadBasix has been adopted by numerous school districts across the U.S. ETS and Capti are continuing to actively improve the capabilities of the assessment and secretly working on a mystery project that will make Capti Assess the most innovative and comprehensive reading assessment platform.