An Informative Assessment

All assessments, whether formal or informal, involve presenting a task to a child, observing the child’s performance, and making some judgement about how well the child can do the task.

These three elements of an assessment task are apparent in each of the 25 challenges presented to a child during an assessment.

The Phonics Advantage Reading Assessment has five aims:

• determine which foundational skills a child has mastered;
• identify children who may require extra support;
• guide the planning of classroom teaching activities;
• assess children’s progress in learning the foundational reading skills; and
• enable parents and caregivers to participate as partners in their children’s learning.

Assessing current skill development. The assessment process begins with determining which of the foundational reading skills a child has already mastered. This is usually done at the beginning of a school year or at the beginning of an intervention program.

Identifying students requiring extra support. Children enter kindergarten with widely varying skill levels. As they progress through school, their pace of learning also differs. Some children require extra support because they lack some of the essential pre-reading skills when they start school, they learn new skills at a slower pace, or both. Results from the Phonics Advantage Reading Assessment can be used to reliably identify which children require extra support.

The assessment was not designed to diagnose specific disabilities, such as autism, learning disabilities, or speech or language disorders. Children with low baseline scores and children who are not making sufficient progress may be referred to psychologists, speech and language pathologists, or other professionals supporting children’s development.

Informing classroom instruction. The assessment enables teachers to identify areas in which individual children and groups of children need particular learning opportunities. It also ensures teachers focus on the key outcomes required for children to become successful readers. After the initial assessment, teachers know which of the foundational skills each child has mastered. They also have a classroom profile that can guide them in planning individual, small group, and whole class instruction.

Assessing children’s progress. Children are assessed regularly to determine their progress in acquiring new skills. Teachers will know which skills every child needs to learn next to continue making progress in reading.

Engaging parents and caregivers as partners. Parents and caregivers are more likely to participate in their child’s learning if they know which skills a child needs to learn as they are developing their foundational reading skills. The results are informative and transparent.

An Efficient Assessment

A concern of many teachers when it comes to assessments is the amount of time they can take away from teaching and learning. Thus, assessments need to be efficient. We define the efficiency of an assessment as:

Efficiency = Actionable information / Data collection time

A reliable assessment of children’s foundational reading skills requires an individually administered assessment; that is, a one-on-one session with an assessor sitting with a child. If a teacher is conducting an assessment during class time, the other children in the class need to be engaged in a learning activity with another staff member. Otherwise, the assessment must be conducted by another professional or administered outside of classroom time.

The Phonics Advantage Reading Assessment is efficient and practical. Here are four reasons why:

Actional Information. The tasks presented to a child are explicitly linked to a small, cohesive set of well-defined learning objectives. These objectives are the essential skills a child needs to master to progress to the next phase.

Short Testing Time. The assessment includes 25 tasks, which we refer to as challenges. Each challenge requires about 2 to 10 minutes, depending on the child. The important difference between this assessment and most other assessments is that a child completes the challenges in a progressive sequence until encountering one that he or she has not yet mastered. A ‘stop rule’ determines when to stop the assessment. After the initial assessment has been completed, the assessor can continue the assessment, starting where the child left off in the previous session.

Easy to Administer. The assessment was designed to be administered by a teacher, educational assistant, or other staff members after a one-hour training session. The assessment includes a training version for each assessment item which includes instructions for administration. After one or two practice sessions, the assessor can use a shorter version.

Flexible Administration. A guiding principle in the design of PARA was “any child, anywhere, at any time”. For example, when a teacher is doing a morning ‘read-aloud’, a child can be taken aside and assessed by an educational assistant. The administration does not require a fixed testing schedule. A teacher may have taught a group of children that had not mastered one of the challenges, such as being able to say the basic phonemes accurately and quickly. After teaching the phonemes for a week or so, the children in that group can each be assessed on the challenge about phonemes. The assessor does not need to start at the beginning and retest challenges that were previously mastered. The PARA can also be administered online with a parent sitting with a child at home and the assessor in another location.

Rewarding. When children reach certain milestones, their success can be recognized and celebrated. The assessment has five levels: Emerging, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.