6. Assessing Student Learning of Phoneme Identification

It's important to assess whether students have mastered the skills you teach, in this case, phoneme identification. Accurate and automatic phoneme identification is necessary to prepare for more advanced skills required for mapping sounds to letters during decoding. So we don't want any gaps here.

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).

A Free, Short, Downloadable Assessment 

Here's a short assessment for you to use to check your students' mastery of phoneme identification. It should take no longer than two to three minutes per child. Feel free to share our assessment with your colleagues.

Tips for Effective Assessments of Phonological Awareness Skills

1. Assess one student at a time.
2. Give a student one task at a time.
3. Do not have any print visible, since you’re assessing a phonological skill. 
4. Do not set a time limit for tasks (typically, each takes two to three minutes per student).
5. Record incorrect responses. Address misunderstandings later on.
6. Do not mark issues caused by a student’s dialect or speech impediments 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 segmentation and blending). 

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 phoneme identification after working through five words, other children might need 10 or 20.

2. Change Your Instruction

If the teaching technique you tried is not resulting in mastery (like the Stretch and Shrink technique above), try another instructional approach to phoneme identification. For example, to work on identifying beginning sounds, you could listen to a series of words and then identify what sound is the same:

What beginning sound do you hear in all three of these words?

You could also ask them to listen to a series of words and then identify the odd sound out:

Which of these three words does not have the same end sound as the others?

Why is it different?

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.