It’s no secret that our education system is obsessed with assessing students—from sounding the alarms with the latest NAEP scores, to what opponents of standardized assessments refer to as the "testing-industrial complex".
In 2023, Storyshares facilitated a professional learning session on EdWeb called “How Do We Teach Teenagers to Read.” We discussed engaging older striving readers with high-interest decodable chapter books and progressing along a phonics-based scope and sequence, all while building reading stamina, learning new vocabulary, and becoming more fluent readers. At the end of the webinar, we asked hundreds of secondary educators to submit their questions. The vast majority of those teachers asked us for assessment recommendations for their older students working on foundational literacy skills. Teachers seemed hungry for one perfect, comprehensive assessment that would give them enough data to determine a course of instruction to meet their students’ literacy needs.
Specifically, teachers wanted recommendations for phonics assessments (this makes sense; we were showing them decodable books and they wanted to know where to begin). However just like we can’t call it a day when a student tanks an exam that demands they read at grade level in order to pass, we can’t rely on phonics assessments alone to inform instruction.
Phonics assessments for older students should be short, targeted, and diagnostic. They should help us pinpoint the skills that students will need in order to decode successfully in order to read fluently, understand what they are reading and, in turn, build knowledge.
There are risks in using a single assessment to determine the course of instruction for an older striving reader. What if they’re having a bad day or didn’t get enough sleep the night before? What if the didn’t understand the instructions (or couldn’t read them)? What if the assessment was designed to assess – for example – vocabulary knowledge, but the student couldn’t decode the vocabulary words to begin with?
Similarly, there are risks to overassessing students. Older students are at greater risk of over-assessing and under-instructing. In fact, education researchers suggest that we need to avoid overtesting in an effort to provide enough hours of instruction to meet the needs of those students.
So… what do we do?! How can we use data-based decision making to select best practices to fill in gaps for the students who need high-quality literacy instruction the most?
Introducing… a tiered assessment system and strategy! We need a system because the demands of structured literacy are many, complex, and interwoven. As a result, we need a strategy that will allow teachers to prioritize literacy instruction.
Tier 1: The Universal Screener
This is administered to all students. Some school districts refer to these assessments as MOSLs (Measures of Student Learning). Some districts prefer to use standardized tests to determine the baseline. The goal of this assessment is to see who might need extra literacy support (not to determine the kind of support they need).
Tier 2: Secondary Diagnostics
Now that you know (from the universal screener) who might need additional literacy support, you can pull those students for short secondary diagnostic tests that focus on literacy subskills (such as one secondary diagnostic for fluency and another for decoding). Not all students take these assessments and some students may need more secondary diagnostics than others. The goal is to determine the strands of literacy students need support with the most. This isn’t because that’s all they’ll focus on; it determines the kinds of scaffolds teachers can provide as well as the intention and intensiveness of the accompanying intervention.
Ongoing Progress Monitoring
The most important piece of the puzzle? Instruction! Assessment that informs instruction is pure gold. With ongoing progress monitoring, we can assess students constantly while teaching them. Formative assessments allow us to monitor student learning to improve teaching and student outcomes. Sometimes, observing students is the best form of assessment. At Storyshares, we love using professional learning to empower teachers with the tools to teach their students in diagnostic and prescriptive ways. When teachers use objective and skills-based observations to diagnose student progress and abilities, they can more accurately and efficiently prescribe instruction to meet the literacy needs of their most struggling students.
Here are two assessments specifically designed for older students:
Looking for more ways to support older striving readers in your classroom? Visit our Educator Page.