Using Assessment to Drive Your Instruction

Aug 21

One common question that’s always asked when talking about the science of reading is, “Where do I start my instruction? What do my students need?” The answer lies in assessments.

Four aspects to keep in mind when choosing assessments:

Each assessment serves a different purpose.
The assessments we are using need to be closely linked to our instruction and should be the driving force behind our instruction.
The data from these assessments must answer the questions we have about our students and those questions must drive our instruction. It’s absolutely vital that the assessments you’re choosing are at the developmental abilities of the students so that the data can reflect their areas of strength and weakness.
We need to be informed of what assessments are out there and how each one can help us in different ways.

Three Main Types of Assessments

Universal screener (benchmarks)- This is where we start. We do these assessments with all students and they tell us which students are on track and which are struggling. And when we find out which of our students are struggling, we then give a…
Diagnostic assessment - This is a pre-assessment or pre-test where teachers can evaluate students’ knowledge of skills before instructing on that skill. This test focuses on a student’s strengths and weaknesses. They’re usually casual, low stakes, and don’t count for a grade.
Progress monitoring - We use these assessments to ensure that our interventions are working.

Helpful Diagnostic Assessments

Phonological Awareness Assessment

Used to assess a student’s ability to hear and manipulate sounds.
It should be used as a formative assessment so you can know where you can start your instruction.
Phonemic Awareness Screener (Freebie Linked HERE)
A continuum shows a progression - it is not a step-by-step process. Students don’t necessarily need to start at the beginning - they just need to start at where they’re struggling.

Phonics, Spelling, and Letter Sound Assessments

Phonics & Spelling Assessments:

Have a predetermined list of words based upon the instruction that’s going to take place. This allows you to see specific areas of weakness. For example, if you ask a student to spell the word glad, and he or she spells g-a-d, then you know you might need to begin instruction with beginning blends.
Whatever screener you use, it should be tightly linked with your phonics continuum as well. Check out my spelling screener I’ve got just for you!

Letter Sound Assessments:

If you’ve asked a student to spell a word and they’re unable to, figure out what letter sounds they do know.
Give a letter sound assessment and see where the gaps are. You can download one here

Word Recognition Assessments

During this screener, students are showcasing their sound-to-symbol correspondence with words in isolation. We’ve asked them to encode, but now we ask them to decode. (You can download this assessment here)

This screener shows us at which level they’re reading. We ask ourselves: Do their skills line up with what they’re able to spell (encode)? Or are they lagging?

Move from words in isolation, move to recognition in context.

Decodable sentences are a good assessment for this to start, then graduating students onto longer passages.

The Benefit of Fluency Screeners

Sometimes we want to start with a fluency screener instead of the other aforementioned diagnostic tests.

This would be the case if, for example, a third grader didn’t perform well on a comprehension exam. Giving this student a short fluency screener will tell us how fluent the student is.
Since fluency lends itself to comprehension, we can see if this is a fluency issues, decoding issue, or if he or she is genuinely struggling with comprehension. A fluency screener tells us if a student is able to access the text.
Fluency screeners show us how many words a student is reading per minute (and accurately), how his or her sentences sound (are they smooth or are they labored?), and how well the student is able to decode words.