A comprehensive guide to literacy assessment

Literacy—the ability to create, consume, understand, and interpret different types of texts—at its most fundamental level begins with building foundational reading and writing skills and identifying instructional needs through literacy assessments.

According to the latest NAEP long-term trend assessment data, nine-year-olds had the largest score decline in reading¹ since 1990. The decline in basic reading skills especially impacted low-performers across racial/ethnic groups.

Following a structured literacy curriculum that implements various types of assessments is the first step in improving reading scores nationwide.

The significance of literacy assessments

Literacy assessments play a critical role in helping educators understand exactly what students need to become stronger readers—but no single assessment fits every situation. Different types of reading assessments serve different purposes: some offer a broad overview of reading skills, while others pinpoint specific skill gaps. Certain assessments stop at identification, while others go further by guiding targeted interventions. Assessments aren’t just for diagnosing challenges—they also help teachers recognize students who are ready for enrichment and extension opportunities.

Types of literacy assessments

There are three common types of literacy assessments: Screening, diagnostics, and progress monitoring. The diagnostic reading assessments each have different goals and periods for evaluation.

Screening assessment

A screening assessment, also known as a universal screener, is a broader assessment that helps teachers identify students’ strengths and weaknesses. It also pinpoints those who are not meeting grade-level learning goals, checks for warning signs, and provides valuable insights to teachers so they can help struggling learners now or in the future.

From a school or district standpoint, a universal screener can confirm whether or not their literacy curriculum is effective in helping students grow toward grade level benchmarks.

How to apply screening assessments

A screening assessment is the critical first step in determining the scope of reading support needed by the school and is usually administered to the entire student population³ three times per year. According to the National Center for Improving Literacy (NSLI), the core elements of screening assessments should be brief, easy to administer, valid and reliable, and timely and informative.

Examples of screening assessments  include identifying individual sounds in spoken words (phonemes) and recognizing letter names or sounds in kindergarten, as well as reading short passages of text in first grade.

Examples of screening assessments

Well-known screening assessments include Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy (DIBELSⓇ) and ACADIENCEⓇ. DIBELSⓇ is used for students in kindergarten through eighth grade.

Meanwhile, ACADIENCEⓇ has multiple assessments including Acadience Reading Pre-K, Acadience Reading K-6, and Acadience Reading 7-8, each made for the respective grade levels in the titles.

Diagnostic assessments

Diagnostic assessments identify specific areas where students are performing and provide more detailed information on where they need help. This type of assessment is usually not administered to the entire student population.

While diagnostic assessments can be informal (for example, homework assignments, student work samples), they are typically more formal in order to pinpoint areas of need to guide educators in selecting targeted support or interventions.

How to administer diagnostic tests

Diagnostic assessments are typically administered one-on-one by reading teachers, special educators, speech-language pathologists, or school psychologists.

General examples include components of literacy subtests:

•  Word recognition—including nonsense word reading
• Decoding
• Reading comprehension
• Spoken and written language

Examples of diagnostic assessments

The Phonemic Awareness Screener for Intervention™ (PASI) is a diagnostic assessment that helps identify mastered and deficit phonological awareness skills. The goal of this assessment is to provide better gauges of students’ skills compared to DIBELS^Ⓡ AIMSweb^Ⓡ—and maps directly to Tier 2 and Tier 3 focused intervention instruction. These assessments are meant to be given directly by the classroom teachers.

Another example is the Phonics Screener for Intervention™ (PSI) which pinpoints the specific needs of students who have poor reading accuracy and/or fluency. This set of reading assessment tools identifies where to start each student’s intervention and how to move them onto another skill.

Progress monitoring

Progress monitoring is a type of formative assessment⁴ that determines if the additional support or intervention is or is not successful. It also allows the educator to make changes to the intervention, continue the intervention, or exit the student from the intervention. This type of assessment should be skill-based and sensitive enough to show growth over a short period.

There are two types of progress monitoring: mastery measurement and general outcome measurement. Mastery measurement tracks student performance on a single skill to ensure mastery before progressing to the next. General outcome measurement monitors overall progress across the curriculum through frequent assessments—either by evaluating all key skills (curricular sampling) or by using student performance scores as indicators of growth.

Administering progress monitoring assessments

Progress monitoring occurs every 1-3 weeks. For example, a teacher may assess a student on a particular skill area to determine if that skill has been mastered so that the student can move on to the next skill area.  Another example is conducting weekly oral reading fluency tests to measure student reading progress throughout the entire year; this may include timed readings where teachers track the number of correct words per minute.

For a specific example, the Phonological Awareness Screener for Intervention (PASI) includes one to two-minute progress monitoring after initial assessment and over 20 progress monitoring assessments per long-form document.

Understanding reading assessments

Effective assessments must identify student skill needs/gaps and diagnose the help they need. Two principles are standards and validity. For standards, literacy assessment must align with established state educational standards. It’s also important to clearly define learning objectives and outcomes to measure. Valid assessments⁵ produce data that can be used to inform education decisions like school effectiveness, teacher evaluation, and individual student performance and gains. It incorporates the assembling of evidence to support test score interpretation based on the desired measured construct. The ultimate goal is to determine if the assessment measures what it’s supposed to measure.

An example of a system that diagnoses and then uses data-informed grouping is the 95 Literacy Intervention System™. This digital platform combines phonics diagnostics with intervention data management and core intervention curriculum. It can automate grouping based on the educator’s desired parameters, consolidate progress measurement data across students, and simplify intervention planning from student skill proficiency data. This helps to ultimately minimize intervention dosages and deliver precise instruction to the right students at the right time.

Formative vs. summative assessments in literacy instruction

The role of literacy assessments is to provide teachers with information regarding the next steps in the learning progression⁹. Assessments are integral in informing educators on how to tailor their instruction while learning is in progress. Assessments can be formative or summative.

The goal of formative assessments¹⁰ is to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback. They’re usually lower-stakes assessments that help students identify their strengths, weaknesses, and additional areas of improvement. For educators, it helps them monitor the progress of student performance and continue to address learning gaps.

Summative assessments evaluate student learning at the end of instruction by comparing it against a benchmark. This is usually a higher-stakes assessment such as a standardized test.

The information from this type of assessment can guide educational efforts in courses that follow.

Success story: Arizona public school district

An Arizona school district needed to increase K–2 students’ phonic skills13 during summer school in summer 2021. This population scored the following on their Spring 2021 Acadience assessment:

• 20% tested below benchmark
• 48% tested well below benchmark

They used 95 Phonics Booster BundleⓇ: Summer School program and aimed to deliver approximately 20 of the lessons over the four-week program.

Students who engaged in the 95 Phonics Booster Bundle: Summer School literacy assessment tools achieved 163% higher gains in phonics skills. Additionally, there was a 122% increase in Acadience Reading scores for rising second graders who were well below benchmark.

Ultimately, the formative and summative assessments of the 95 Phonics Booster Bundle: Summer School program helped students with higher risks for reading failure narrow the gap in phonics deficits.

Using assessments to improve literacy instruction

To summarize, literacy assessments are crucial in promoting literacy development since they help educators identify students’ strengths and weaknesses. Screening, diagnostics, and progress monitoring serve distinct purposes in providing valuable insights for tailored instruction. Together, phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension assessment methods can accurately provide a holistic picture of student reading skills. Literacy assessments—including formative and summative assessments—can further guide and enhance instructional decisions.

If you’re looking for effective assessments and intervention materials, 95 Percent Group assessments can help identify skill deficits, personalize student instruction, and provide whole class and small group learning to close skill gaps.

Sources

1. “NAEP Blog – Performance Declines in Basic Mathematics and Reading Skills since the COVID-19 Pandemic Are Evident across Many Racial/Ethnic Groups.” n.d. Nces.ed.gov. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/blog/pandemic_performance_declines_across_racial_and_ethnic_groups.aspx.
2. “Literacy Assessment: Definitions, Principles, and Practices.” 2018. NCTE. October 25, 2018. https://ncte.org/statement/assessmentframingst/.
3. Renaissance, Michelle Hosp, Ph D. , Director of Foundational Literacy. 2023. “The Critical Role of Phonics Assessment in the Science of Reading – SPONSOR CONTENT.” Education Week, April 1, 2023, sec. Teaching & Learning, Reading & Literacy. https://www.edweek.org/sponsor/renaissance-learning/the-critical-role-of-phonics-assessment-in-the-science-of-reading#:~:text=A%20phonics%20assessment%20is%20an.
4. “Understanding Screening.” 2020. National Center on Improving Literacy. March 2, 2020. https://improvingliteracy.org/kit/understanding-screening.
5. Munger, Kristen A. 2016. “5. Types of Literacy Assessment: Principles, Procedures, and Applications.” Milnepublishing.geneseo.edu. Open SUNY Textbooks. 2016. https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/steps-to-success/chapter/5-types-of-literacy-assessment-principles-procedures-and-applications/.
6. Review of Progress Monitoring: Mastery Measurement vs. General Outcome Measurement. n.d. Iris Center . Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Accessed December 11, 2023. https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/modules/pmm/pdf/IRIS_PM_InfoBrief_011420.pdf#content.
7. The Center on Standards & Assessment Implementation. 2018. “Valid and Reliable Assessments CSAI Update.” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED588476.pdf.8: “Understanding What Works in Oral Reading Assessments.” 2016. Uis.unesco.org. November 18, 2016. https://uis.unesco.org/en/blog/understanding-what-works-oral-reading-assessments.
8. “On the Limitations of Using Vocabulary Tests with School-Aged Students | Smart Speech Therapy.” 2018. Www.smartspeechtherapy.com. August 22, 2018. https://www.smartspeechtherapy.com/on-the-limitations-of-using-vocabulary-tests-with-school-aged-students/.
9. “Types of Informal Classroom-Based Assessment | Reading Rockets.” n.d. Www.readingrockets.org. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/assessment-and-evaluation/articles/types-informal-classroom-based-assessment#:~:text=The%20typical%20type%20of%20reading.
10. “Literacy Assessment: Definitions, Principles, and Practices.” 2018. NCTE. October 25, 2018. https://ncte.org/statement/assessmentframingst/.
11. Carnegie Mellon University. 2020. “Formative vs Summative Assessment.” Www.cmu.edu. 2020. https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/assessment/basics/formative-summative.html#:~:text=The%20goal%20of%20formative%20assessment.
12. “Gains Study of 95 Phonics Booster Bundle.” n.d. Accessed December 11, 2023. https://live-www-nfpg.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/95-Percent-Group_Booster-Bundle-Summer-School-Study-Results.pdf