Pitfalls of Phonological Awareness Screening beyond Grade 1

What Is Known about the Role of Phonological Awareness (PA) Assessment in Literacy Screening?

PA and Early Reading (Grades K and 1)

PA is the ability to reflect on and manipulate the component sounds of spoken words (e.g., syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes).

Studies show that students who demonstrate difficulty with phonemic awareness at the beginning of reading instruction may have risk of early reading difficulties.

It is important to teach children to recognize the sound structure of words, link those sounds to letters, and then blend and segment the sounds to read and spell words.

Data from the i-Ready Diagnostic shows a strong correlation between how students performed in PA in Grade 1 and how they performed in overall reading in Grade 3.

Considerations for Older Proficient Readers (Grades 2+)

PA is not reading—it underpins successful reading. Older proficient readers who demonstrate proficiency with decoding are implicitly demonstrating sufficient underlying phonological processing skills.

When screening for reading difficulties, the best measure is the one that most closely reflects reading. For older proficient readers, that measure is decoding and reading fluency.

If a student demonstrates difficulty with decoding, it is appropriate to follow up with a PA assessment, but PA should not be the preliminary screening measure for students in Grades 2+.

What Happens When Older Proficient Readers Are Assessed in PA?

Working Hypothesis and Questions

Older proficient readers appear to rely on print over sound to solve PA tasks. They even will create print in their mind's eye to enable the reading process to solve these tasks. Success with some tasks may indicate proficiency with phonics and orthography, not phonemic awareness, while errors with other tasks may reflect the many discrepancies between graphemes and phonemes in English. Improper interpretation of this data can lead to the misidentification of students in need of reading intervention.

Do PA assessments accurately and validly measure older proficient readers' phonological processing proficiency?

Does performance on PA assessments correlate to older proficient readers' reading proficiency, and is it predictive of literacy outcomes?

Observations to Date

A proficient Grade 4 reader makes frequent errors on a phonemic segmentation task. Watch the video to learn more.

Administering PA items to proficient Grade 3 students resulted in high rates of guessing and inconsistent data patterns.

Many proficient Grade 2 readers in Washington demonstrated below-grade level performance in PA.

Support from the Field

The International Dyslexia Association recommends PA screening for Grades K and 1 students, and by Grade 2, moving to word and nonword identification.

DIBELS® 8th Edition does not include PA in its screening composite score for students in Grades 2+ and only includes PA for Grade 1 students if they score below grade level in nonword reading.

Further Support from the Field

Elhassan, Crewther, and Bavin (2017) examined the contribution of PA to established readers ages 9–12. They concluded:

“PA did not influence performances on any of the reading measures examined for the fluent reader group. The results support the notion that fluency is characterized by a shift from conscious decoding to rapid and accurate visual recognition of words.”

Hogan, Catts, and Little (2005) measured the relationship between Grade 4 reading outcomes and PA proficiency in Grades K and 2. They concluded:

“PA assessment provides information about reading in Grade K but loses its predictive power at Grade 2. At that time, PA and word reading become so highly correlated that PA does not add information to the prediction of Grade 4 reading.”

Scarborough, Ehri, Olson, and Fowler (1998) investigated the claim that skilled readers possess and display a high degree of phonemic awareness through three studies. They concluded:

“Data are presented that challenge this claim and indicate that many mature readers are unexpectedly inaccurate on phonemic awareness tasks.”

For more information, reach out to Molly Buck, M.Ed., associate vice president of assessment, or Megan Perna, associate director of assessment.