Assessing Decoding in Isolation at the Beginning of the Year
At the beginning of the school year, it’ is’s helpful to get a snapshot of each student’s decoding skills. If you already have a schoolwide screener like Acadience, DIBELS, iReady, FastBridge, or STAR in place, you may have some or all of this information. Each screener’s assessments vary in how much detail they assess and give in terms of what a child knows about particular phonics concepts.
So, depending on your screener, you may need to dig deeper. To do this, you can use a phonics diagnostic. (Also known by terms like secondary screener for phonics, informal phonics inventory, phonics skills survey, or something similar.) Your phonics curriculum might have its own version, or you may already have a different one at your fingertips. At Daffodil Hill Press, we offer a Word Decoding Assessment, too within our free downloadable Assessment Toolkit. But there are many out there that do the same, simple job.
How a Phonics Diagnostic Can Help
A diagnostic like this can help you uncover which word types a child can read accurately. It will assess concepts like:
- Short vowel words
- Words with blends and digraphs
- Silent e words
- R-controlled vowels
- Vowel teams
- Diphthongs
It can be helpful when the diagnostic matches the order and content of your agreed upon phonics curriculum and/or intervention approach, whether that’s UFLI Foundations, Fundations, 95 Percent Group, etc. It just makes it easier to interpret the results.
Ultimately, from this kind of assessment, you can see:
- Phonics skills/concepts/graphemes that are secure
- Phonics skills/concepts/graphemes that are emerging
- The next skills/concepts/graphemes to target
You can use this information to consider a student’s needs and their alignment with Tier 1 instruction. You can also spot gaps and place students at the right starting point for intervention or small group differentiated reading instruction that reinforces or extends a child’s phonics and reading knowledge.
For example, if a child’s word decoding assessment shows a need to work on CVCe or Silent E type words, you can match them to instruction from our Bit by Bit Collection 2 Silent E books.
From Isolation to Context
It can also be valuable to see transfer of phonics knowledge into connected text. How does a child’s isolated decoding ability transfer into real reading? To do this, you can listen to them read a decodable text that matches the phonics that they are secure with. For example, if a child can read simple short vowel words and words with blends and digraphs, then you might listen to them read a text that includes those types of words, with limited to no unfamiliar phonics concepts beyond that.
At Daffodil Hill Press, we provide free Decodable Book Assessments for this purpose as part of our Assessment Toolkit. These assessments let you:
- Note the accuracy of students’ reading
- Listen for automaticity and fluency
- See why a child may make mistakes
- Engage in a short discussion with a child about the text
It’s not necessary to do this with every student, but it can be especially helpful for students you’re curious about or when you have time for a small group devoted to reading observation.
A Note on Comprehension
When a student is still doing a lot of decoding work, it’s normal for comprehension to be limited during the first read. That’s okay. Give them the chance to reread—once decoding becomes more automatic, more “brain space” will be available for meaning-making.
Bringing It All Together
Assessing decoding both in isolation and in context gives you a complete picture:
- Isolation assessments show you what phonics patterns a child knows.
- Context assessments show you how well they apply those patterns when reading.
When you know about a students’ strengths and areas for instruction, you and the student are set up for success. This knowledge can help you communicate information to caregivers, service providers or families, plan target small-group instruction, make decisions about Tier 1 instructional fit, and match students with the right decodable texts from the start.
Ready to start? Download our free Assessment Toolkit if you haven’t yet!