Assessment
Screen, diagnose, and progress monitor students to drive instruction at school or at home.
Screen, diagnose, and progress monitor students to drive instruction at school or at home.
Assessment is not a test your child passes or fails. Assessment is how the teacher finds the exact next thing your child is ready to learn. You can do informal assessment of things like fluency or comprehension at home by asking your child to read aloud (and time them or count words missed) or asking them questions when they read.
At conferences, ask: “What do the reading assessments show, and what is the next skill you’re targeting?” Teachers using this portal will have a specific answer.
Most children are assessed several times a year to get a baseline, assess progress formally, assess progress informally, etc. Flagging a skill for extra practice starts early — which is exactly what the research says works.
Five minutes a night on the specific skill the teacher identifies beats an hour of general “reading practice.”
Ask how your child is growing against their own starting point. Growth curves matter more than any single level or score.
Recent research around the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy highlights the importance of using strategies such as Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to identify students with reading challenges. MTSS is supported by a large body of research and allows schools to identify and support at-risk students as soon as possible. In the MTSS model, Tier 1 includes the classroom curriculum provided to all students, Tier 2 includes differentiated support in classrooms as well as intervention provided outside the classroom to at-risk students, and Tier 3 includes intensive intervention outside the classroom. Schools generally use a set criteria (i.e., all students performing below the 25th percentile on NWEA and below the 25th percentile on DIBELS qualify for Tier 2, all students performing below the 10th percentile on NWEA and below the 10th percentile on DIBELS qualify for Tier 3). Research outlines the importance of employing Structured Literacy Principles to teach collect diagnostic information about student skills in a range of reading areas (phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, writing) in order to effectively guide instruction that is systematic, structured, cumulative, and explicit.
Evidence-Based Practices for Assessment
Specific strategies were identified including identifying a building level team to facilitate universal screening and progress monitoring, select efficient screening measures to identify students at-risk of reading problems, use benchmarks/growth rates to identify at-risk students, use curricula that addresses all elements of reading instruction (phonics, phonemic awareness, reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary), build skills gradually with a high rate of teacher feedback, implement support 3-5 times per week for 20-40 minutes.
Within the MTSS model, Tier 1 and Tier 2 students receive in-class differentiated support from classroom teachers. Teachers utilize school-wide data (NWEA), classroom data, and/or complete additional assessments (Ex: Core Phonics Survey, Phonological Awareness Skills Test, Sound-Symbol Correspondence Test, LETRS Spelling Screener, DIBELS) to determine student needs and plan differentiated instruction. Collecting additional data on fundamental skills helps teachers determine if instruction is being delivered at the right level and pace, decide how to group students and plan instruction that will meet student needs. Teachers can use methods ranging from Guided Reading to Word Study to support students within the classroom.
Steps in the planning process are:
While it is best for schools to use high-quality, school-wide measures of literacy skills such as DIBELS, if your school does not give an assessment measuring any of the below skills you can use some of the free assessment links included below.
Print Awareness includes an understanding that print carries meaning and that books contain letters, words, sentences and spaces. It includes familiarity with a front cover, back cover and spine. Examples of assessment questions are: Can you show me….
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Letter-sound assessments measure students' ability to give the name and sound of letters in the alphabet. Examples of questions are:
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Phonological/phonemic awareness assessments may measure a range of components:
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Phonemic awareness assessments measure the following components:
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Automatic word recognition assessments measure sight word recognition at a given grade level.
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Phonics assessments measure a wide range of phonics elements at a given grade level (letter-sound knowledge, decoding skills, etc.).
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Reading fluency includes rate (speed), accuracy (words read correctly), and prosody (reading with expression). Assessments may measure any/all of these skills. Since word recognition is an important part of fluency, sight word assessments are also useful to measure fluency.
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Reading comprehension assessments measure a wide range of skills, ranging from basic (literal understanding, retell) to more advanced (inferences, predictions).
Free Sample Assessment(s):
Spelling and reading are integrally linked, so spelling assessments frequently give a detailed picture of a student's reading needs.
Free Sample Assessment(s):
The video library has clips of real K–3 classrooms modelling every one of these practices, and the printables library carries materials for the same skills.
Seven evidence-based literacy practices for kindergarten through third grade — the research, the teaching sequence, and the materials, free for teachers and families.