Can your students read? Try this simple assessment to find out

Can your students read? Or are they memorizers?

Do they know letters? How about letter-sounds?

Teachers can often feel when their students can’t read - they see their students are lost and even adjust how they deliver instruction in an effort “to get through the content.” From telling their students words they can’t read, to reading aloud to them (so they don’t have to) - teachers are doing everything they can, without knowing how to identify the root of the problem, or fix it.

In this blog post, I show a diagnostic assessment you can use today to determine if your students have the basic foundational literacy skills they need to read words.

Kickstarting the year with winter assessments

It’s January - a time of reflection and goal setting - and the halfway year mark for us educators living the school year calendar. 

We are all recovering (and feeling rejuvenated, I hope!) from Winter break - and for many of us - it’s time to conduct “winter assessments” to track our students’ literacy progress. If you’re an educator who is trying to figure out if your student can read or not, a great place to begin is to determine if your students know letters and their sounds.

There are a few assessments out there we can use - those by CORE and LETRS for example, are amazingly helpful. I loved their assessments but found when working with educators there were a few additional pieces of information we wanted to know.

So, I created a diagnostic tool (an assessment that provides specific data to show instructional needs) that provides a little more insight into our students’ letter identification ability and knowledge of letter-sounds. Introducing (drum roll, please!), the LILS assessment - just a FREE download away.

Key features of the LILS assessment:

• Font styles to determine if our students can identify letters when presented in different fonts

• The 2 sounds of the digraph th: voiced & unvoiced

• The 3 sounds of the vowel u: /ŭ/, /ū/, /oo/

• Hard and soft c & g 

• The letter q is presented next to u (when qu are together, q spells /k/, and this is the only time a vowel is acting as a consonant - u spells /w/)

This assessment has been tested over the last 4 years in 5 schools, in K-12 instructional settings. It has helped uncover hundreds of students in elementary, middle, and high school who can’t read an EXIT sign. Yup, you read that right. When asked where the EXIT sign is, they can point to it to identify it - but they’re merely recognizing it based on its rectangular shape and the bright red color of the letters.

They can’t read it.

Why? The LILS assessment gave us the answer - font. When presented with uppercase I and L in various fonts (see the image below), students identified the middle letter as an L.

Even when reminded - “Remember, you will see the same capital letter appear in different fonts. There are no lowercase letters here.” - Hundreds of students in grades 1 through 12 across multiple districts confirmed their response.

When shown an EXIT sign and asked “What are the letters in this sign?” - the same students who couldn’t identify the letter on the assessment replied “E, X, L, T.” 

Why can’t my students identify letters?

We can start teaching students different fonts as early as the middle of grade 1, but most curricula does not guide educators to do this. This means most educators don’t even think about teaching it. Print is all around us, and many of us assume students can read the print surrounding us every day in the “real world.” 

We have to explicitly teach our students to read - and that includes explicitly teaching them the different fonts of the printed letters. Unless someone says “this font style represents a lowercase L AND an uppercase I and here’s how you know the difference…” - many of our students are going to remain lost. 

Are you wondering how to administer the LILS assessments? I made this quick video to guide you through it. 

May the LILS tool serve you in your everyday work of changing students’ lives.

If you’re reading this blog - you’re clearly committed to the never ending quest of learning. You’re amazing. Keep at it - the more you know, the more students’ lives will be changed because of you.

Now get out there and make sure all of your students can actually read an EXIT sign! :)