If students are “taught” skills that they already know or they aren’t ready for, or if they are given reading materials that are too easy or too challenging, valuable instructional time will be wasted and the students will likely be frustrated or bored. On my website, buildingliteracy.org, I have listed under the Free Resources tab a number of informal assessments that can be used to gauge students’ grasp of foundational skills. According to formal studies and reports from the field, foundational skills have taken a major hit during the pandemic. Available assessments include the Letter Names Test, the Letter Recognition Test, Detecting Beginning Sounds Test, Isolating Beginning Sounds Test, Foundational Skills Screener, Beginning Consonant Letter Sounds, Word Reading Fluency, Individual Phonics Inventory, Group Phonics Inventory, Individual Graduated Syllable, and Group Graduated Syllable Survey. Assessments can be initiated with The Foundational Skills Screener. The Foundational Skills Screener is a brief, individually administered assessment that ranges from beginning consonants to multisyllabic words. The Screener can be used to estimate the student’s level of need so that a more thorough assessment, such as the Beginning Consonant Letter Sounds, Individual Phonics Inventory, Group Phonics Inventory, Individual Graduated Syllable, or Group Graduated Syllable Survey. can be administered. All of the assessments are individually administered except for the Group Phonics Inventory and the Group Graduated Syllable Survey. The group assessments don’t do as good a job indicating needs as do the individually administered tests. However, they allow for the efficient assessment of groups of student. Students whose performance is problematic can be administered an individual version of the assessment, which will provide a more thorough look at the students’ grasp of the skills tested,.
Deficiencies in foundational skills can go unnoticed, especially in the middle grades where it is expected that students will have mastered basic decoding skills. According to a recent NAEP study of the oral reading fluency, decoding, and word recognition of a sample of fourth graders, a third of fourth-grade children are reading on a Below-Basic level and may still lack the fluency and foundational skills necessary “to support continued progress in reading comprehension” (White, S., Sabatini, J., Park, B. J., Chen, J., Bernstein, J., and Li, M. (2021). (The Basic level on the NAEP is estimated to be on grade level. The Proficient is an aspirational level that is above grade level.)
In the study, Below Basic was divided into three groups: Low, Medium, and High, with 11 percent in each group. The word recognition of the High Below Basic wasn’t very far below the Basic. High Below Basic students could probably be accommodated by being provided extra assistance. They might be able to handle grade level text if given additional preparation. The Medium Below Level group would likely need some additional small group instruction. Grade level text would mostly likely be too challenging for them. They would need texts on their instructional level and instruction that would boost them up to grade level. The difference between the Low Below Basic group and the Medium group was quite dramatic. On grade-level passages, the Low Below Basic group misread an average of 16 out of 100 words. They would need intensive small group and possibly individual intervention and materials on their instructional level. The goal would be to boost their skills and increase the challenge of the materials they read so that eventually they would be reading on or close to grade level.
Reference
White, S., Sabatini, J., Park, B. J., Chen, J., Bernstein, J., and Li, M. (2021). The 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency Study (NCES2021-025). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for EducationStatistics. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2021025