6. Assessing Your Students' Skill with Onset-Rime

It’s important to assess whether students have mastered the skill you just taught, in this case, onset-rime. This will help you address any gaps in reading skills that could cause problems later on.

Mastery assessments are quick checks to see if your students can accurately and consistently perform a skill. (We’ve got one for you below.) Generally, you’ll know it’s time to give a student a mastery assessment when they’re able to perform their new skill accurately three times in a row, on three different occasions (for example, three days in a row). In your assessments you will look for signs that students have mastered blending and segmenting onset-rime.

• Students have mastered blending onset-rime when they can accurately repeat a segmented word and restate it as a blended word. For example, if you say /s/, /ōp/, they can repeat it as /s/, /ōp/ and then say soap.
• Segmenting is a more difficult skill. Students have mastered segmenting onset-rime when they can accurately repeat a word and stretch the onset from the rime. For example, if you say barn, they can repeat barn and then say /b/, /arn/.

A Free, Short, Downloadable Assessment 

Here’s a short assessment for you to use to check your students’ mastery of onset-rime, including blending and segmenting. It should take no longer than two to three minutes per child. Feel free to share our assessment with your colleagues.

Tips for Effective Assessment of Phonological Awareness Skills

1. Assess one student at a time.
2. Give a student one task at a time.
3. Use manipulatives as a scaffold; but for mastery, students should complete tasks without them. 
4. Do not have any print visible, since you’re assessing a phonological skill. 
5. Do not set a time limit for tasks. Typically, each takes two to three minutes per student.
6. Record incorrect responses. Address misunderstandings later on.
7. Do not mark issues caused by a student’s dialect or speech impediment as errors.

What Do Your Assessment Results Mean?

Students who respond correctly 80% of the time (or higher) on the assessment we’ve provided are ready to move on to the next skill in the phonological awareness continuum (in this case, phoneme identification).

For those who aren’t reaching 80%, there are three instructional options you can use to provide additional support: 

1. Add Time and Repetitions

You can increase the amount of time for instruction, slow the pace of instruction, and allow more time for practicing the skill. For example, while some children might catch on with onset-rime after working through five words, other children might need 10 or 20.

2. Change Your Instruction

If the exercises above with felts don’t deliver results, you could try another instructional approach. For example, you could bring in pictures of words (a cat, a bat, a dog) to help children focus as they work to blend or segment onset and rime. 

3. Change Your Student Groupings

If students who are falling behind have only been practicing in a whole group, try small-group instruction. If they have only been practicing in a small group, try one-on-one instruction. Some students may need multiple opportunities for individualized practice with prompt corrective feedback.