23-'24 BOY Product Updates

Learn about our product updates for the 2023-2024 school year.

With our Beginning-of-Year benchmark window now underway, we are excited to share what's NEW with the EarlyBird BOY assessment:

NEW Full inventory, expressive responses for Letter Name and Letter Sound  


Last year's Letter Name screen vs. this year's screen

The Letter Name and Letter Sound subtests are now expressive, oral response subtests, and they include the full inventory of letters.  

In Letter Name, students will now be asked to name the letters on the screen out loud. They will be given all 26 letters.

In Letter Sound, students will now be asked to orally produce the sound of the letter displayed on the screen. They will be given all 26 letters, and Grade 1 and EOY Kindergarten students will be given three additional digraphs (sh, th, and ch). 

Learn more

 



NEW Delayed green arrow display

On expressive, oral response subtests, there will now be a 2-second delay before the green arrow (which allows the child to move on to the next item) is displayed.

 This will help discourage accidental or impulsive pressing of the green arrow before the child has completed their response.


NEW PreK percentile ranks


PreK percentile scores


The PreK results dashboard now shows percentile ranks across all subtests except Letter Name and Letter Sound.  

Percentiles are expressed as a number between 1 and 99, with 50 being the average. This means if a student scored in the 70th percentile, they performed better than 70% of the other students in the normed sample.

Once enough data becomes available to create percentile ranks for Letter Name and Letter Sound, we will update the dashboard to include those later in the year.


Updated Kindergarten and Grade 1 percentile ranks 

As part of our typical process to ensure our normed percentile data is current, we have updated the norms across all grades and subtests for the '23-'24 school year.

All norms are aligned for each time of year (BOY, MOY, EOY), and were created from a demographically representative nationwide sample using EarlyBird student data from the '22-'23 school year.



Predictive profiles at BOY

At the beginning of year for Kindergarten, we will now be providing only the dyslexia risk prediction to identify those students who need more immediate support and to help focus on skills that are expected for this benchmark period.



Don't forget to update!

For those districts using iPads, please make sure to update the EarlyBird application on all devices before BOY testing. The latest version is 1.5.1.



Your feedback helps us improve EarlyBird

Our product updates are based on customer feedback and onsite research. Thank you to the districts who have shared feedback to help us improve!

If you’d be willing to speak to our Product team about your EarlyBird experience and give us suggestions, please email grace.gee@earlybirdeducation.com or let your Customer Success Manager know.  



Questions?

1.  Starting after Labor Day, join the Literacy Team at Office Hours on Tuesdays, 2:30-3:30 ET or Fridays, 8:30-9:30 ET. (Find the Zoom link on the dashboard login page.)

2.  Contact support@earlybirdeducation.com


- The EarlyBird Team