There are many literacy screeners on the market, many of which are well-designed, valid, and reliable, that are now being used by our NJ public schools - by force, not choice, by the way due to new state mandates. Some, like iReady and Acadience, include spelling aside from the usual phoneme segmentation, nonsense word reading, and oral reading fluency tasks. Acadience's supplemental spelling assessment, for example, requires the student to produce the word in writing. iReady, on the other hand, presents tasks that require the selection of the correctly spelled word rather than writing it independently. Acadience only assesses spelling in K through 3rd grades. Others, like iReady, are adaptive, so if a student performs well early on, they "test out" of spelling.
We have many K to 3rd grade students in our schools that look good on these early literacy screeners. They "passed" or "tested out of" the phonological awareness and spelling tasks asked of them in 1st and 2nd grades, but yet, now in 4th, 5th or 7th grades, they are not reading or spelling accurately. Of note, is that screening laws like those in New Jersey do not extend beyond 3rd grade, so higher level phonemic awareness, decoding, and encoding skills are not mandated to be assessed in 4th grade and beyond. I have evaluated many older struggling readers who qualified for Special Education services due to poor reading/spelling skills who "passed" early screeners. They typically had amazing visual memories, btw, which helped them fly under the radar as well as attending schools that had little to no expectations for accurate spelling. "Spelling doesn't matter in this day and age," is a quote that I'm tired of hearing from educators - spelling matters. I have worked with countless adults who were embarrassed about their spelling skills despite having "spellcheckers."
If you want to know how well a student is processing sounds, understands and applies English orthography, and also get a snapshot of their overall literacy skills, give them a SPELLING assessment. Research continually informs the field that spelling weaknesses hinder overall writing development, so it's worth the 10-15 minutes to assess a student's spelling skills. And yes, it doesn't take long to conduct a classwide spelling assessment. The only time I've had teachers of older students say it took longer than 15 minutes to assess spelling was when their students’ letter formation skills hindered the ability to quickly get their words on paper..... the issue of letter formation requires a separate blog post!
SUGGESTIONS
1. use one of the resources below, organized by grade level (thank you Neuhaus!)
2. conduct the spelling assessment with your whole class (we have a lot of hidden SLD's in our schools)
3. dictate the word, have the students repeat the word to ensure they all heard it correctly
4. use the charts below to determine common error patterns that require instruction (a worksheet is not instruction)
5. did you identify students with well-below grade level spelling skills - outliers in the class whose spelling attempts are not even phonologically accurate?
6. Use the chart to plan intensive intervention (3x to 5x weekly for 6 weeks) for those well-below for reading and spelling purposes
7. Repeat assessment after 6 weeks (assess only those patterns that were taught in that timeframe - this is not about memorizing the words on the lists below, but truly owning the patterns/rules that were taught.
3rd grade: https://neuhaus.org/wp-content/uploads/Spelling-rubric-for-3rd-grade-SM-.pdf
4th grade: https://neuhaus.org/wp-content/uploads/Spelling-rubric-for-4th-grade-SM-.pdf
5th grade: https://neuhaus.org/wp-content/uploads/Spelling-rubric-for-5th-grade-SM-.pdf
6th - 9th grades: https://neuhaus.org/wp-content/uploads/Spelling-rubric-for-6th-and-9th.pdf
QUESTIONS - send them my way
Susan E. Miller
susan@write2readsolutions.com