Unlike many other assessments, the Phonics Advantage Reading Assessment (PARA) is not conducted as a pre-test at the beginning of the year and a post-test at the end of the year. Instead, PARA is a continuous assessment designed to inform your teaching practice on an ongoing basis.
When should I (re)assess my students?
While a baseline assessment is conducted at the beginning of the school year to gauge which skills the students have already mastered, best practice is to continue to assess your students with regularity. For example, if you have 20 students, assessing one student per day would allow you to assess your entire classroom within a single month. Another way to approach it would be to plan on assessing each student approximately once every four weeks.
Additionally, in determining when to assess and where to begin at each subsequent re-assessment date, use your professional judgement of progress based on the instruction taking place and your observations of students’ pace of learning.
For example, if you see a student have an “aha” moment about an important skill, you may wish to assess them earlier than planned to get a better sense of their progress and the instruction they need. However, it is important to assess even those who may not appear to be showing progress, as this will help provide clarity about next steps and where to focus your instruction.
Where do I start the next assessment?
When you begin a subsequent PARA assessment, start with the challenge the student was unable to pass during the previous assessment (obtained a score of 1 or 2 points).
As illustrated below, we recommend reassessing the student on challenges which they had not demonstrated proficiency, such as Challenge 4 (initial score of 2).
Note: We also recommend you reinforce the skills where a student scored a 3, and return to assess these at a later date. However, you do not need to begin the next assessment on a challenge with a score of 3 (like Mia’s initial score of 3 on Challenge 3 in the example below).
Example
During her baseline assessment in September, Mia received the scores below. The stop rule was applied at Challenge 4, since she didn’t get a score of 3 or 4. By hovering over the Challenge number in Progress Monitor, you can see that to advance, Mia will need more instruction and practice with the letter-sound correspondence of the first 10 basic phonemes.
Next month, after working with Mia on these letter-sound correspondences, you resume PARA at Challenge 4 to see if Mia can score a 3 or 4. She does! The assessment continues until Challenge 7 where the stop rule is once again applied due to a score of 2.
Several weeks later, Mia is assessed once again, this time starting at Challenge 7. She is proficient enough to continue to Challenge 10, then the stop rule is applied.
Continue assessing the students and practicing skills with them throughout the school year. Review the progress chart on the child report page to get a sense of the learning trajectory of your students.