One thing there is no shortage of in education today are tests. In fact, there are so many that in recent years parents have begun to opt their children out of the state comprehensive assessments, which can take hours to complete and generate undue stress for the children. Who can really blame them?
Despite this, there is one type of assessment that is truly the essential first step to successful reading instruction with elementary age students. That is diagnostic testing. Without taking the time to assess each student individually, a teacher doesn't have the information necessary to know how best to meet the needs of each learner.
Standardized Testing
Often viewed as the bane of the teaching profession, testing is an inevitable event in the lives of educators. In addition to the annual state comprehensive tests, many school districts administer assessments periodically throughout the year to track their students’ progress.
As a teacher, I was often frustrated by the design of many of these assessments. The material at times was presented in a way that was foreign to my students, even though they had mastered the concepts.
In some cases, the content was completely developmentally inappropriate for the students. How many nine or ten-year-old students do you know who will go to the trouble of toggling between two long passages on their iPads to answer a multiple-choice question?
The timed tests for the primary students were particularly disturbing. Woe to the student with slightly slower processing speed! If the child took more than five seconds to respond, the item was marked wrong, even if he/she answered correctly after six seconds. I often wondered if the people designing these assessments had ever spent time with a six-year-old.
Because of this disconnect, I would lose even more valuable instructional time, so I could teach my students how to take the test.
I could go on and on, but suffice to say, I believe commercialized tests have a long way to go before they can do more than confirm what the teacher usually already knows.
Diagnostic Testing
On the other hand, early diagnostic testing proved invaluable to my success with students when teaching them to read. A diagnostic test is broadly defined as a test to determine a condition or its cause.
At the start of every school year, I assessed each of my students individually to ascertain which phonics skills they had mastered and what skills they still needed to learn. This diagnostic testing is necessary to create a road map for your students and answer the important question: Where should I start?
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that the students have already mastered the standards in previous grades. In my experience, that was often not the case. Most of my students who were struggling to learn to read did not know their short vowel sounds, regardless of their grade levels. It was also common for my upper elementary students to need instruction on how to divide larger words into syllables, especially if they had learned to read primarily through sight words.
Experts generally agree that children progress through the following sequence when learning to read.
However, when teaching phonics, some categories may be merged, such as when the students begin reading CVC words while they are mastering the consonant and short vowel letter-sound correspondences. Many teachers teach letter names at the same time that they are teaching letter sounds. And some experts don’t include letter recognition as a part of phonics instruction at all.
Creating Your Own Diagnostic Phonics Assessment
You can create a simple diagnostic assessment using a set of cards with the lower-case letters written on them to check for letter recognition and letter-sound correspondence mastery. This video demonstrates the correct pronunciation of most of the letter sounds.
Once the students have demonstrated mastery of the letter-sound correspondences, you can make a list of ten words for the students to read that are examples within each category listed in the phonics sequence above, starting with consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words.
When making the word lists, take care to only use the sound patterns that were introduced previously to your students. For example, only use short vowel sounds in your words until you reach the long vowel/silent e list. Also, try to incorporate a variety of consonant and vowel sounds in your words.
While assessing, be sure to make a note of any letters, sounds, or words each student misses and what he/she says instead. Once a student makes two errors or more on the same word list, you can end the assessment. This is the place where phonics instruction should begin for that student.
After assessing your students, review their results carefully looking for identifiable error patterns. For example, did a student miss all the words with the short e sound? Did a student make errors due to b/d reversals, such as saying dog when the word was bog?
Through this process, you will quickly become familiar with the phonics skill levels of your students, allowing you to design the best learning experiences to help them master the skills they need to move forward on their reading journey.
Another benefit is that the same diagnostic assessment can be used more than once with the students to track their growth over time. I gave my students the same assessment in the fall, winter, and spring, and then shared the results with their parents at conference time. What a wonderful thing it is to share with parents the true growth their child has made over the course of the year in a form they can actually see!
If you are interested in using this approach but would prefer to purchase a ready-made assessment, here is the link to a phonics assessment I created to help you: Phonics Placement Assessment and Reading Diagnostic Test for Elementary Students | Waltzing Blossom Lit
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