Moving From Assessments to Intervention Series

Blog Post 1: Screening & Diagnostic Assessments

Back to school season always has me thinking about beginning of the year assessments and how to use that data to make really good instructional choices about instruction and intervention. As a Literacy Coach, I want to share my process with you to help you as you look at district-wide, building-wide, classroom-wide and/or student-specific assessment data.

Over two blog posts, let’s look closer at each of these steps and really break down what needs to be done. This first blog will cover screening and diagnostic assessments and the second blog will look at grouping students and choosing interventions.

1. Screening Assessments are for ALL Students

2. Diagnostic Assessments Give You More Information

3. Assessment Data Helps Us Group Students by Lowest Level of Literacy Need

4. Student Need Informs the Intervention

Screening Assessments are for ALL Students

Use a High-Quality Screener

I use Acadience with my students. Dibels is another common screening assessment. Both Acadience & Dibels are free if you use the paper & pencil version. They have digital platforms that districts can purchase too.

There are other screening assessments that districts use, but if you have any say in what you use, lean towards Acadience or Dibels! They are the best of the best!

ALL Students Get the Screener

The screening assessment you use is for ALL students. It is your quick & efficient way to check on the whole system, individual classrooms, and individual students. You can think of it like a thermometer, taking the temperature of the literacy system in your school.

Red Flags & Green Flags

I often tell teachers that our screening assessment is a way for students to wave a red or green flag at us about their literacy skills. Students who meet the benchmark are waving green flags because they are likely to meet literacy goals with core instruction. Students who do not meet the benchmark are waving red flags, asking us to come look closer to figure out what they need to be successful.

Screening Measures are Indicators of Risk

The different measures on your screening assessment, like Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) or Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF), are indicators of risk. That means if students do poorly on any of the measures, they are likely to struggle when acquiring literacy skills. This is where educators have the power to step in and change a child’s literacy trajectory!

Different Measures at Different Grade Levels

With screening assessments like Acadience & Dibels, you’ll give different measures at different grade levels. Some of the measures tell you exactly what a student needs and some point us to the right diagnostic assessment. I’ll share more about this in my post about diagnostic assessments!

Looking at the Whole System

Screening assessments also help us look at literacy strengths and needs of the whole system (district-level, building-level, and/or classroom-level).

Are there areas where a whole grade level is weak? Are there certain classrooms with greater need? We can look at this kind of data to make adjustments to our Tier 1 instruction, as needed.

Diagnostic Assessments Give You More Information

Look at the Red Flags

Your screening assessment will tell you which students to look at more closely. You may need to give additional diagnostic assessments to any students who scored below the benchmark cut scores in order to help you pinpoint where they need support in their literacy skills.

I also encourage teachers to look closely at students who just made it past the cut scores. They may also need some extra support.

Types of Diagnostic Assessments

Depending on the screening measures given, you may need to know more about a student’s alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness knowledge, phonics knowledge, or spelling knowledge. This is where a more thorough diagnostic assessment can help.

Diagnostic assessments usually take longer to give to students, but they give us valuable information about what a student knows and doesn’t know yet. This information is crucial for grouping students by skill-based need. It will also help us choose appropriate interventions to provide to students.

Screening to Diagnostic

This is a general guide for moving from an Acadience screening measure to the appropriate diagnostic.

If a student did poorly on… —> Use this diagnostic…

• Letter Naming Fluency —> Alphabet diagnostic

• First Sound Fluency —> no diagnostic needed

• Phoneme Segmentation Fluency —> Phonemic Awareness Diagnostic

• Nonsense Word Fluency —> no diagnostic needed

• Oral Reading Fluency (words correct per minute & accuracy) —> Phonics Diagnostic

Alphabet Diagnostic

If you need to know more about which letter names and sounds a student knows and doesn’t know, use an alphabet assessment.

• Really Great Reading’s Letter Knowledge Survey

• Heggerty’s Letter Identification and Sounds Assessment

Phonemic Awareness Assessment

If you need to know how well a student can hear, produce, and manipulate speech sounds (phonemes), use a phonemic awareness assessment.

• Really Great Reading’s Phonological Awareness Survey

• Heggerty’s Phonemic Awareness Assessments

• 95% Group’s Phonemic Awareness Screener for Intervention (PASI)

Phonics Assessment

If you need to know which phonics patterns a student can read along a scope & sequence of phonics patterns, use a phonics assessment.

• Really Great Reading’s Beginning Decoding Survey

• Really Great Reading’s Advanced Decoding Survey

• 95% Group’s Phonics Screener for Intervention (PSI)

• LETRS Phonics & Word Reading Survey

Spelling Inventory

If you need to know which phonics patterns a student can spell along a scope & sequence of phonics patterns, give a spelling inventory. This is a helpful diagnostic to give alongside a phonics diagnostic too!

• Words Their Way Spelling Inventories (Primary, Elementary, & Upper Elementary)

• LETRS Spelling Screeners (Basic & Advanced)

What About Fluency?

It is normal for students to lack overall reading fluency when they are still developing automaticity with skills like phonemic awareness and phonics. If a student is in an intervention group for those skills, I would not focus on overall reading fluency yet. Build those foundational skills first!

I only consider a fluency intervention group when students are accurate with reading and spelling grade-level text but are not reaching the words correct per minute (WCM) cut scores on Acadience and/or lack expression and prosody while reading. This is usually a very small group of students.

What about Comprehension?

It is normal for students to struggle with reading comprehension if they are still working to develop foundational reading skills.

I would only consider a comprehension intervention for a student if they have met the benchmark scores on all other screening measures but struggled with screening measures like the Retell part of an Oral Reading Fluency measure and/or the MAZE (grades 3+).

Two comprehension diagnostics to check out:

• Acadience’s CFOL

• Language Dynamics Group’s CUBED

Coming In Blog Post #2…

• Assessment Data Helps Us Group Students by Lowest Level of Literacy Need

• Student Need Informs the Intervention