What is ESGI? The Pre-K to 2nd grade assessment platform, explained
ESGI is a digital platform for one-on-one, teacher-administered skill checks in Pre-K through 2nd grade. It is not an IQ test. Here is how it works.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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ESGI, short for Educational Software for Guiding Instruction, is a digital assessment and progress-monitoring platform for Pre-K through second grade. A teacher administers it one child at a time, sitting beside the student with a laptop or tablet and tapping correct or incorrect as the child names letters, produces sounds, counts objects, or reads sight words. It is not an IQ test, and it returns no IQ score or norm-referenced ability estimate. What it records is whether a child has mastered a taught skill on a given day, a different question from the one a cognitive battery asks. This article covers who publishes ESGI, what a session looks like, what its data can support, and how it sits alongside the intelligence tests used with the same age group.
Who publishes ESGI, and what happened to esgisoftware.com
ESGI is published by Riverside Insights, which acquired the company in October 2019. At the time of that deal the platform carried roughly 1,200 pre-loaded and customizable assessments and was described by the acquirer as a software-as-a-service system for administering, creating, tracking, and reporting teacher-led assessments of early childhood students. The library has since grown past 2,500 pre-loaded tests.
One change is worth flagging for anyone searching today. The standalone esgisoftware.com marketing site no longer exists as a destination. As of September 2026 it redirects to riversideinsights.com, where ESGI sits in the K-12 assessment catalog next to CogAT, the Iowa Assessments, and easyCBM. Older pages redirect there too, and only the application sign-in and the support knowledge base still run on the original domain. The product is active; the brand has been absorbed into its parent's site.
Riverside Insights states that ESGI has been in classrooms since 2001, is used in more than 5,000 districts, and has reached over 7 million students. Those are publisher figures rather than independently audited ones, and they describe scale rather than outcomes.
How a one-on-one ESGI session actually works
The mechanics are deliberately low-tech on the child's side. There is no student login and no adaptive item selection. The teacher holds the device, shows or says the prompt, and scores the response immediately.
• The teacher is the administrator and the scorer: Every item is marked by an adult watching the child respond, which is why ESGI works for skills a four-year-old cannot demonstrate by clicking, such as producing a letter sound aloud or counting a set of objects.
• The content is drawn from a library or written by the teacher: Riverside Insights supplies more than 2,500 pre-loaded tests aligned to Head Start Early Learning Outcomes for pre-kindergarten and to the Common Core State Standards for kindergarten through second grade. A test builder lets a teacher assemble a check for whatever the class is working on this week.
• Results post in real time: Scoring an item updates the class dashboard at once, so a teacher finishes a round of testing already knowing which children to group together.
• Reports travel to families: The platform generates personalized parent letters in a student's home language, plus printable home activities and a conference scheduler.
• Specialists can tag items to IEP goals: Interventionists can attach an assessment directly to an individual education program goal, so each session produces progress documentation for eligibility reviews and team meetings.
District documentation shows what this looks like in practice. Mt. Diablo Unified School District in California has all transitional kindergarten and kindergarten students take ESGI assessments in English language arts, mathematics, and, for the dual-language program, Spanish language arts. Three components are required and given one-to-one: letter sound recognition, number identification, and subitizing, which is recognizing how many objects are in a small set without counting. Students are assessed four times a year.
What ESGI measures, and what it does not
ESGI is a "criterion-referenced" system, meaning each result is judged against a fixed skill target rather than against other children. The question is whether this child knows these fifteen letter sounds, not where the child ranks nationally. That design has real strengths for daily teaching and clear limits beyond it.
The platform reports which items a child answered correctly, how that set has changed since the last administration, and how the class distributes across a skill. It does not report a standard score, a national percentile, or an ability index. Because teachers can write their own tests, there is no fixed item set across classrooms unless a district standardizes one, which the administrator tools allow.
That flexibility is the point of the tool, and it is also why the output should not be read as a measurement of a child's capacity. A score of 12 out of 20 on a teacher-built sight word check tells you the child knows twelve of those twenty words. It does not tell you why, and it cannot separate a child who has simply not been taught them yet from a child with an underlying learning difficulty. Sorting that out is clinical work belonging to qualified evaluators, not to a classroom progress monitor and not to any online test.
How ESGI relates to an IQ test
Cognitive tests and skill checks answer different questions, and the difference shows up in almost every design decision.
An individually administered intelligence test for this age band, such as the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, uses a fixed set of items, a scripted administration protocol, trained examiners, and a national standardization sample. Its output is a standard score on a scale with a mean of 100 and a "standard deviation" of 15, which is a measure of how spread out scores are in the reference population. That machinery exists so the score means the same thing in any two schools.
ESGI has none of that machinery, and does not claim to. Its items change by classroom and by week, its administration is intentionally informal, and its results are meaningful within a school's own instructional system. The contrast is visible inside Riverside Insights' own catalog: CogAT, from the same publisher, measures verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal reasoning and is positioned for gifted identification, while ESGI tracks foundational academic skills. One asks about reasoning ability, the other about taught content.
The relationship between the two is complementary. Early-skill data from a tool like ESGI, or from a fluency-based screener such as DIBELS, tells a team which children are not progressing as expected. A cognitive evaluation, when a school team decides one is warranted, is part of how they investigate why. A weak result on a classroom skill check is a prompt to teach and observe rather than a finding about intelligence.
Evidence base and honest limitations
ESGI holds the Research-Based Design: ESSA Tier 4 product certification from Digital Promise, awarded after the company submitted evidence linking learning research to the product's theory of change. Riverside Insights also publishes an evidence packet prepared by the outside firm LXD Research, containing a logic model and literature review.
The precise meaning of that certification matters. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, Tier 4 is the level described as "demonstrates a rationale." According to guidance from the Institute of Education Sciences, a Tier 4 intervention is supported by a well-defined logic model based on high-quality research plus a plan to study its effectiveness, and, unlike Tiers 1 through 3, it does not require results from a previous study showing a statistically significant effect. Tier 4 says the design is grounded in research, not that the product raised achievement. Digital Promise's product list also notes that this certification has been superseded and is no longer offered.
The publisher's case studies should be read the same way. Riverside Insights reports that in Washington County School District in Utah the share of kindergarteners reaching state literacy benchmarks rose from 74 percent in 2020 to 91 percent in 2024. That is a vendor case study without a comparison group, so it cannot separate the platform's contribution from curriculum changes, staffing, or the wider post-pandemic recovery in early grades.
None of this makes ESGI a weak tool for its actual job. Frequent, low-stakes, item-level data on foundational skills is useful to a teacher, and collecting it digitally rather than on clipboards returns time to instruction. The caution is about scope. Treat the output as instructional information, and keep measurement error in mind whenever a single administration drives a decision.
For adults who want a norm-referenced picture of their own reasoning, the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test was developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne for ages 18 and up. It runs 15 subtests across six cognitive indices covering verbal reasoning, fluid reasoning, spatial ability, working memory, processing speed, and reaction time, takes about 52 minutes, and reports scores on the mean-100, standard-deviation-15 scale. It is an assessment of cognitive ability and does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation. You can take the RIOT IQ test here.
Frequently asked questions
Is ESGI an IQ test?
No. ESGI measures mastery of taught academic skills such as letter sounds, number identification, and sight words, and it produces no IQ score, standard score, or national percentile. Intelligence testing for young children is done with individually administered cognitive batteries by trained examiners.
Who administers ESGI assessments?
Classroom teachers, and in special education settings interventionists and related service providers. The adult holds the device, presents each prompt, and scores the child's response on the spot, one child at a time.
What grades does ESGI cover?
Pre-kindergarten through second grade. Riverside Insights describes the pre-K content as aligned to Head Start Early Learning Outcomes and the K-2 content as aligned to the Common Core State Standards.
Can ESGI diagnose a learning disability?
No. It can show that a child is not making expected progress on a skill, which is information a school team may use when deciding whether to investigate further. Diagnosis requires a comprehensive evaluation by qualified professionals.
Is ESGI still sold under its own brand?
The product is active, but esgisoftware.com now redirects to Riverside Insights, which acquired ESGI in October 2019. Sign-in and support still run on the original domain, and the publisher offers a 60-day free teacher trial.
How does ESGI compare with DIBELS or easyCBM?
All three monitor early academic progress. DIBELS and easyCBM are curriculum-based measures with fixed, timed probes and benchmark cut points, while ESGI is a flexible platform whose content a teacher selects from a library or writes from scratch. Schools sometimes run one of each for different purposes.
References
1. Riverside Insights. (2026). ESGI: Online assessment tool for early learners.. riversideinsights.com
4. Digital Promise. (2026). Research-based certified products.. digitalpromise.org
5. Institute of Education Sciences. (2024). Calling all districts and schools: Here's how to collect rigorous evidence to know whether your ESSA Tier 4 intervention works.. ies.ed.gov
7. Mt. Diablo Unified School District. (2026). ESGI K/TK assessments in ELA, SLA and math.. mdusd.org
Hero image: “Learning to write with children's letter blocks - 51070633961.jpg” by perpetual.fostering, licensed CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ALearning_to_write_with_children%27s_letter_blocks_-_51070633961.jpg).
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