The Five Essential Assessments for Every Teacher of Reading
When we understand the purpose of different reading assessments and how to interpret our data, we can strategically plan intentional, evidence-based literacy instruction. But, without this understanding, planning instruction becomes a shot in the dark (a little background knowledge here, a little phonics there). When we know assessments, we don’t have to guess (wouldn’t it be nice to know that everything you’re doing with your students each day was a direct response to your data?)
If you know me, you know that I truly didn’t know how to create this effective, data-based instructional system until I understood the ins an outs of assessments. So today, let’s lay the groundwork by briefly going over five of the essential types of assessments. And then, in a future post, we’ll dive into more details about each one.
Before we dive in, I want to level the playing field by building your background knowledge on assessments. Here are few important principles of reading assessment that I think every teacher should know:
Assessments answer questions about instruction, not about problems with the student. You’ll see that before I describe each assessment, there is an italicized question under each subheading. This tells you which question each assessment answers. Not included in the list today is outcomes-based assessments, which answer, “Did our instruction work?” and that is because outcomes-based are typically our state tests. Although state tests are important, I think it’s more important to talk about formative assessments because those assessments give teachers the most power. The main point is, we don’t give assessments, see that students are struggling, and assume that the problem lies within the student (this is why we have so many special education referrals and not enough interventionists to support struggling readers— we are not reflecting on our own instruction as a means for fixing the problem because that requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is too scary).
Not every student needs a diagnostic assessment, and not every student needs to be progress monitored, however, EVERY student needs to take the universal screener. The universal screener is the most important assessment, and you’ll see why when you read on below!
Running records assess a student’s ability to use guessing strategies to read words. If your school has switched to the Science of Reading and you are still being asked to use running records to assess growth, you will continue to run into a brick wall trying to align your assessment process with your instruction. Evidence-based instruction requires assessments that align with how reading skills develop and are achieved over time. You’ll learn how they align below.
The five essential assessments are:
Universal Screeners
Diagnostics
Progress monitoring
Survey
Classroom-based
Let’s talk a little about each one.
Universal Screeners
What students and systems are at risk?
Universal screeners help teachers determine the overall reading health of a student as well as the core instruction that student receives. They are the one assessment that all students should receive, 3x a year. Some examples are Acadience Reading K-6 or DIBELS 8.
The individual data tell us where a student stands in terms of their reading development in relation to benchmark scores that indicate where they should be. This is huge, because it allows us to predict which of our students are at risk for future reading difficulties.
The aggregate data tells us about changes we might need to make to our core instruction. For example, if more than half of my first grade class is below the benchmark on nonsense word fluency (NWF), that’s an indicator for me to adjust my tier one instruction to better meet this need.
A quality universal screener has assessment measures that are indicators of the acquisition of essential early literacy skills (think the big five, phonemic awareness phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension). Below are some common measures from universal screeners and the essential skills they inform us about:
Oral reading fluency (ORF): Advanced decoding, word attack skills, reading fluency, reading comprehension. ORF is assessed from the middle of 1st grade through 6th grade.
Nonsense word fluency (NWF): Letter sound correspondences and basic phonics
Phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF): Phonemic awareness
First sound fluency (FSF): Basic phonic awareness
After giving the universal screener to all students, examining the data is key. The data will help you to form initial focus points for whole and small group instruction. For example, if you teach second grade, how many students are below benchmark on ORF but at or above benchmark on NWF? That’s a group of students that need work on one of the skills ORF indicates (advanced decoding, fluency, or comprehension). It will also tell you which students need to be progress monitored. You’ll want to group assessments based on similar patterns. Notice which percentage of your students are struggling with which skills. Examine specific errors on each screening measures to pinpoint common needs. Students with the same score will not always have the same need. If you can’t plan your instruction based on your screening data, using a diagnostic is the next step.
We could spend a multi-day training diving deep into universal screeners and understanding how their data provides the foundation for our core instruction, but we’ll save that for another blog post. For now, let’s talk about diagnostics.
Diagnostics
Where do I start my instruction?
Diagnostics are assessments that help us dig deeper into a student’s needs. They are typically the second step after giving the universal screener. Because diagnostics take a lot of time to administer, we need to be thoughtful about who truly needs one. If you can plan your instruction from your universal screening data, you do not need to give a diagnostic. For example, if your nonsense word data tells you that Johnny needs work on blending, you don’t need to do a diagnostic to further affirm that. Simply work on blending!
If your student is below the benchmark on a word recognition skill, you will use either a phonics or phonemic awareness diagnostic.
If your student is at or above benchmark on all word recognition skills, but below benchmark on reading comprehension, you can use a comprehension diagnostic.
My favorite free assessments for diagnostics are listed below:
Phonological Awareness: PA Survey from Really Great Reading
Phonics: CORE Phonics
Comprehension: CUBED
Spelling: Spelling Inventory
Diagnostics tell us exactly where to begin instruction.
Progress Monitoring
Do I need to change my instruction?
Progress monitoring tells us whether or not we need to make a change to our instruction. If our students aren’t making progress, we need to first examine our teaching. This is hard and requires vulnerability, but we need to stop immediately referring students to special education if the data shows they are behind. It’s more likely that the instruction needs tweaked to better serve the student. Some questions to reflect on are:
Are we using explicit language?
Are we giving enough practice?
Are students spending enough time in connected text?
Are students being given enough opportunities to respond?
Make some adjustments that consider the above questions and check your data in a few weeks to see if the student is progressing.
Progress monitoring should be brief, standardized, and scheduled. It needs to be brief so that it doesn’t pull away from instructional time. It needs to be standardized, which means the student receives the same directions, forms, and allotted time each time. It needs to be scheduled so that it doesn’t become forgotten. The frequency of progress monitoring should match the level of concern you have for the student. I progress monitor weekly because if I don’t, it’s challenging for me to see if my instruction is working. If you are new to progress monitoring I recommend starting with a couple of your most struggling readers– those ones in the red that you have the greatest concern for. Progress monitoring can happen with grade level material but typically does not- because the students we progress monitor are often significantly behind. We want to monitor students’ progress in their lowest skill deficit, i.e the skill they don’t have that is stopping them from making progress.
Here is an example:
Jane is a grade 2 student. It is the beginning of the school year. Her teacher uses Acadience Reading as her universal screener. Her screening data shows that Jane is below benchmark on ORF (oral reading fluency). Jane’s teacher has learned how to find the lowest skill deficit, so she checks the scores on ORF. Jane’s retell score is below benchmark, so she looks at the words correct per minute score (WCPM). Her WCPM is also below the benchmark, so her teacher examines Jane’s accuracy score. Jane’s accuracy score is at benchmark, which means Jane is decoding well and reading words accurately. Since her accuracy score is at benchmark, Jane’s lowest skill deficit is the next one up- indicated by her below benchmark WCPM score (fluency). Her struggles in fluency are stopping her from reading at an appropriate rate and understanding what she is reading. Her teacher will progress monitor her every week with second grade ORF WCPM, setting a goal for Jane to meet the beginning of the year WCPM benchmark by October, so that Jane can meet the middle of the year benchmark in February on time. Jane’s teacher will focus on evidence-based fluency strategies like repeated reading with decodable and authentic texts, phrase cued reading, and scooping. Since she has noticed a similar data pattern in many of students, she decides to implement some of these practices whole group as well.
I prefer to use Acadience Progress Monitoring because it aligns with the screening benchmarks for Acadience.
Survey Level
What is the student’s lowest skill deficit? (this becomes the instructional focus and progress monitoring measure)
When we survey back, we start at comprehension and drop down a step to see which skill is blocking the student from making progress.
Survey level assessments help us figure out where to start instruction for students who are significantly behind. Acadience is the only company I know that makes a survey level assessment. If you don’t have the funds to purchase a survey assessment, it’s not too cumbersome to do this process on your own. I like to call it “dropping back” to figure out what the lowest skill deficit is for that student. When you find the lowest skill deficit, you find the barrier that needs to be removed so that the student can progress as a reader.
For example, if Ella is a grade 3 student who is below benchmark on ORF, you might drop back to nonsense word fluency (NWF) to check her basic decoding skills. When you do this you find that she is also below benchmark on NWF so you check her phoneme segmentation fluency score (PSF) and you learn that she is above the benchmark for PSF. Since NWF is an indicator of letter sound correspondences and blending, these two essential early literacy skills are her lowest skill deficits, and these are the skills you’ll need to work on with Ella. NWF also becomes the measure you progress monitor with.
Classroom-based
Can I move on to the next skill?
A quick spelling check helps us see if students are ready to move on to the next phonics skill.
Classroom-based assessments are any teacher created assessments, or quick checks from your reading program that tell you if you can move onto the next lesson or skill. I always think of this question: “did they have it or didn’t they?” One example of a classroom-based assessment is a skill-based spelling test. Let’s say that you taught the SH digraph this week and on Friday you want to see if they got it, so you give a skill-based spelling test to see how they do. If they spell almost all SH words correctly then you know you can move on. Most programs have a percentage or number correct students should attain before moving on. Classroom-based assessments are informal and sometimes happen on sticky notes or exit tickets. The primary goal is to formatively assess so that you can see if you can move on to the next skill.
Final Thoughts
This is a very brief overview of reading assessments. I’d love to know in the comments which assessments you have questions about!
