Welcome to Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, a professional learning series presented by David Kilpatrick, sponsored by the Exceptional Student Services Unit, and created in collaboration with specific learning disability specialists, Jill Marshall and Veronica Fiedler. The Colorado Department of Education's vision is that all students in Colorado will become educated and productive citizens capable of succeeding in society, the workforce, and life. The mission of the CDE is to ensure all students are prepared for success in society, work, and life by providing excellent leadership, service and support to schools, districts, and communities across the state. in multiple ways.
You can complete all 13 modules. Participants who engage in all 13 modules will be provided a comprehensive learning experience encompassing research, impact, and critical elements of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. You can complete individual modules. Participants may view a session or sessions for specific information and guidance on topics related to assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. This format is ideal for short professional development opportunities, for example, during an impact team meeting or professional learning community.
You can also complete this as a book or chapter study. Participants may view all or part of the series as a tandem companion or supplemental resource for supporting a study of the book, The Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Module 6 Introduction to Reading Assessment Assessing Phonological Skills Session 1 Introduction to Intervention-Oriented Assessment Hello, this is David Kilpatrick and I am your presenter for these 13 on-demand webinars.
These webinars are designed to help teachers and other educational professionals learn about the reading research, particularly as it pertains to assessment. prevention, and overcoming reading difficulties. Here's an overview of the 13 modules.
We are about to begin module 6. Module 6 has three sessions. The first session is on an introduction to intervention-oriented assessment. As a result of viewing this session, participants will be able to define and describe intervention-oriented assessment.
They will also be able to indicate ways that it differs from conventional assessment. And finally, they'll be able to identify the benefits that intervention-oriented assessment has for teachers and for students. Let's take a look at some of the problems with our traditional assessments.
Traditional psychoeducational assessment as performed by school psychologists, by reading specialists, math diagnosticians, speech pathologists, etc. have often focused on determining the absence or presence of an educational disability. And there have been many discussions, and I remember this from grad school in the 80s, they talk about focusing and learning about kids'strengths and weaknesses. And these discussions, however, have never been informed by research on reading, writing, and math. They've just been more... generic idea of determining strengths and weaknesses perhaps intuitively.
In my field, the school psychology field, the idea of strengths and weaknesses has often been related to scatter in cognitive profiles in terms of looking at some highs and lows. on traditional cognitive assessments. And often, based on intuition and tradition, when one looks at strengths and weaknesses within certain academic skill areas, such as the child seems to be good at phonics, the child has poor sight, word memory, et cetera, these efforts have not necessarily reflected the research into reading or writing or math. the traditional strength and weaknesses approach is still with us.
In fact, it plays a major role in the school psychology field among many practitioners. However, I don't know that I've seen any advance in terms of incorporating the research on reading into that framework. This traditional approach of looking at strengths and weaknesses works backward from cognitive assessment research.
Also, in recent years, however we've had it with us for a lot longer than that, interventions are based on learning theory, classic behavioral psychology. Their assessments rarely include things that might dabble in the area of cognitive psychology, such as working memory, rapid automatized naming, and sometimes even vocabulary. Often these... Learning theory based approaches have inadequate assessments of phonemic awareness.
And some of them have even limited assessments of letter sound proficiency. For example, a very popular test looks primarily at CVC words. These basic approaches work backward from learning theory.
And they don't often provide information about why a child is struggling reading. Classic learning theory as it pertains to reading has two major principles. One is practice, and the other is breaking it down into digestible sections.
So therefore, phonic instruction breaks things down, practice, repeated readings, those tend to be the recommendations coming out of learning theory. And one of the assumptions that's often made is it doesn't matter why the child is struggling, the actual intervention technique is going to be to practice and to break things down. So apply the principles regardless of the cause of the problem.
Interestingly, those two major principles, that result in the idea of teaching phonics as well as reading practice. We will see more about this as we get to Module 11, but neither of them produces large standard score point gains on nationally normed assessments. Intervention-Orient Assessment is my idea of working backward, not from learning theory, not from the cognitive assessment literature, but working back from the actual research on reading, writing, and math.
Our focus here, of course, is on reading. The idea is to go to the research literature and understand how reading works and why some children struggle, and then work backward from that. Secondly, my idea is to understand what is the most effective approaches based on the intervention research. What you're going to find throughout these modules is that the research that had the strongest results in terms of intervention happens to align very closely with the research on word learning.
How we actually... Learn and remember words. The focus of intervention-oriented assessment is on why a student struggles in reading. The goal is to suggest more informed instruction based directly on the actual intervention research that we have. We're not inferring simply from a broader learning theory or traditional cognitive assessment research.
The goal of intervention-oriented assessment is not... to determine if a child has a specific learning disability in reading. However, the type of data that you would gather in such an evaluation could be useful in those cases when someone is seeking a diagnosis of a specific learning disability. Intervention-oriented assessment is often much less time consuming because one doesn't necessarily have to give extensive test batteries that are often found in some of those individualized evaluations. In terms of trying to implement intervention-oriented assessment, there are some concerns.
First of all, there are no test batteries based upon this approach. This means that evaluation teams have to draw subtests from some existing batteries. Individual subtests end up getting interpreted, and that's a problem. There are some technical problems with doing that based on what's called subtest reliability.
Composite scores based on multiple subtests have greater reliability than individual subtests do. And as a result, there is some... Uncertainty when one gives a subtest and therefore it's rather questionable to put too much emphasis on any one subtest by itself.
The solution is to use multiple subtests from different batteries that evaluate the same skill. In other words, there are many word identification subtests, there are many tests of rapid naming, there are many tests of nonsense word reading, there are many tests of phonological awareness, etc. And if you find that across these multiple subtests, students do similarly, then that increases your confidence in any hypothesis you happen to have about why a child is struggling. One of the issues as to why it's important to look at subtest scores, and as I'm recommending multiple subtests of the same item, is that composites often group together various skills that are related but that can be distinguished from one another.
So for example, I'm a major fan of the CTOP, the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing. We're going to learn more about that in upcoming sessions. I strongly recommend it. However, I'm very wary about the composite, at least the phonological awareness composite, because you have two subtests in there that look at phoneme analysis and another subtest that looks at phoneme blending.
And very often you're going to have a child who's very good at blending, and that may artificially raise the composite score and mask the problem that the child has. And then also, for example, the Woodcock-Johnson achievement, excellent set of tests. But I'm very concerned about the broad reading. When you start grouping together a comprehension subtest with a word identification subtest with a nonsense word reading subtest, those are all three different skills that you want to look at.
And to be able to say something about, to simply group them together is you're going to be canceling out some of the variations that a child has that is very important to know about when it comes to designing instruction. Now the idea of relying on similar subtests. Some may think that this means that you're going to do a lot of extra testing.
The reality is most of the tests that you would use based on intervention-oriented assessment for reading are very brief. For example, you may want to use two or three word identification subtests. Each of those only takes a minute or two. You do a rapid naming test.
The kid does the test in 15 seconds. Working memory takes about a minute or so. So the idea of doing multiple subtests of the same type doesn't result in hours and hours of testing.
Another issue in terms of this subtest reliability and using different subtests from different batteries. I realize there are some technical problems with that in terms of these batteries being normed on different populations. But many of these subtests intercorrelate with each other pretty strongly, suggesting that they're doing a pretty good job of sampling the skill levels throughout the country. But keep in mind, intervention-oriented assessment is not about... Making a determination of whether or not a child has an educational disability.
It's designed to develop an intelligent hypothesis as to why a child is struggling and that will help determine how we teach the child. Another problem is the issue of interpreting average. Typically in the speech pathology school psychology field, average is within one standard deviation of the mean.
So that represents a very large portion of the population. So only students in the bottom 16% would be considered below average. But here's the problem with that.
That's a 100-year-old or more than 100-year-old statistical definition of what's considered average. It is not based on what we call base rate. Base rate is how common something actually appears in the population.
We have, based upon the National Assessment of Educational Progress, On average, about 30% of fourth graders reading below a basic level. That means we have a large portion of children who struggle. Not 16% of children reading below a basic level.
We have 30% of children reading below a basic level. That's a base rate. What if, based upon a 100-year-old statistical phenomenon and decisions that were made in terms of labeling how far you are from the mean by statisticians over 100 years ago, What if we were to say that if you were to go and had problems with your vision, but you were not allowed to get glasses, your insurance company would not pay for glasses.
In fact, you wouldn't even be allowed to be sold a set of glasses because your score is in the 30th percentile, and yet you're having a great difficulty seeing. Well, maybe 30, 40% of adults have a hard time seeing and wear glasses. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but this is how we operate, which is most unfortunate.
Now, keep in mind. With none of this about interpreting average, am I talking about coming to a decision for an educational diagnosis? Instead, I'm talking about recognizing that a child has a problem, and what are the nature of those problems?
We will be talking about this issue of average a little bit more in upcoming sessions. If you have a child, for example, who gets an 8 on a subtest, where the mean is 10 and the standard deviation is 3, or on a Another scale where 100 is average and the standard deviation is 15, similar performance would result in a 90. And in most people's way of framing this, they would say that's average performance. But that's 25th percent.
Gentile well below the base rate of reading problems in this country So we have to be very careful about what we constitute as average again. I'm not talking about diagnosing a learning disability I'm talking about whether or not a child needs help and Looking at the skills that go into that child's reading abilities in terms of framing our intervention Intervention-oriented assessment consists of an evaluation designed to determine why a student struggles. And the goal is for a well-designed intervention approach for that child.
It differs from... conventional assessments in that it works backward from the research on reading development and difficulties and it doesn't focus on determining if a child has an educational disability. The benefits of intervention oriented assessment include less time because you're not necessarily giving a whole IQ test, you're not necessarily giving a whole achievement battery, you're just giving targeted tests.
of various sorts that we will learn about in upcoming sessions to help understand why a child struggles and to help with their intervention planning. And second, as just mentioned, it helps provide guidance for designing well thought out interventions that have a greater likelihood of succeeding. So what might you need to consider to adjust any of your assessment practices if you do assessments so that they become intervention oriented?
Next up in this module we're going to talk about assessing phonological skills. Module 6 Introduction to Reading Assessment Assessing Phonological Skills Session 2 Issues in Assessing Phonological Skills Hello, this is David Kilpatrick and I am your presenter for these 13 on-demand webinars. And these webinars are designed to get the best available research on reading out of the technical journals and into the hands of the people who need it the most to help with assessment, prevention, and overcoming reading difficulties. Here's an overview of those 13 webinars. Each webinar has between one and seven sessions within it.
We're now in Module 6. 6 there are three sessions and we're going to be focusing on session 2 which is issues in assessing phonological skills. As a result of watching this webinar participants will be able to identify some of the challenges in assessing phonological skills, describe the importance of assessing phonological working memory and rapid automatized naming, and indicate why phonemic manipulation tasks are more useful than other phonemic awareness tasks. Finally, we're going to take a look more carefully at this issue of what constitutes average performance. The phonological core deficit has a few possible features. Struggling word readers may display one or more of them.
Usually they display more than one. They include poor phonemic awareness, poor phonemic blending, poor rapid automatized naming, poor phonological working memory, and poor letter sound skills, which is often reflected in poor nonsense word reading. These are the skills that should be assessed in any evaluation of a student with a word level reading difficulty.
I have been assessing these skills now for about 18 years and I could not see myself doing a good job of doing a reading evaluation if I don't have some information on each one of these skills on the students that I'm evaluating the first four of these are going to be covered in this module and the last the nonsense word reading is covered in module 7 As mentioned in the previous session, to address the issue of subtest reliability, it's recommended to use multiple tests of the same skill. Also, it's important to recognize that a scaled score of 7 or 8, or a standard score of 85, to 90 they go between the 16th and 25th percentile and we should not treat these as average once again we're not talking about identifying a learning disability we're talking about determining if the child has some weaknesses that need to be addressed I consider a 9 or a 95 standard score borderline. It's at the 37th percentile. That may seem to be a little bit conservative, but you have to realize that the National Assessment of Educational Progress has had as many as 34 percent of the population struggling in reading in fourth grade.
So 37th percentile is just on the outer edge of that. 9, I would say, is borderline, and how we would interpret that 9 would be different depending on the rest of the child's skill profile. I'll talk about that coming up.
It's also important to distinguish between phoneme analysis and phoneme synthesis, which is blending. Phoneme analysis involves taking words apart, and phoneme synthesis involves taking parts and blending them into a word. And based on how orthographic learning occurs, That's covered in detail in Module 4. The role of phonemic awareness and blending, or when I say phonemic awareness here I'm talking about phonemic analysis, and blending should be clear.
Blending is essential for phonic decoding, but phonemic awareness not only assists in spelling but it also assists in anchoring words into long-term memory. If we understand the role that blending and phoneme awareness or phoneme segmentation play in reading, Why would we worry about phonological working memory and rapid automatized naming? Quite frankly, despite literally hundreds and even thousands of studies that look at working memory and or rapid naming as it relates to reading, researchers still don't have a very clear and well-defined understanding of precisely why these two skills are disruptive. We're not going to spend a lot of time at all going through what some of the possible theories are. We just know...
that there is a very strong relationship between poor working memory, poor rapid naming, and poor reading. If we don't have a real clear theoretical understanding of where rapid naming and working memory fits in to reading and why it disrupts the reading process, why would we even bother evaluating it? I think there are several reasons.
First of all, it takes very little time to evaluate these skills and it tends to yield some pretty important information as you'll see below. Both rapid naming and working memory are good predictors of later reading skills. They're also good predictors of who are going to be treatment resistors.
It also can help us explain why a student struggles. So if we ask the question, why is this child struggling, we may say he's having difficulty with phonological awareness, rapid naming, working memory, or some combination of those. A very important role that these play is that they change the equation when you interpret other reading-related scores. So for example, let's go back to that 9 I mentioned on a previous screen.
A child gets a 9 on a phonological awareness task. Say the elision subtest from the CTOP, the comprehensive test of phonological processing. That's at the 37th percentile.
Not a particularly strong score, but would you consider that an average score? I would say it depends. Would you want to give that child some additional phonological awareness training?
Maybe, maybe not. It may relate to how they do on the working memory subtest and the rapid naming subtest. So if you have a student that gets a 9 on phonemic awareness, but they get a 6 on working memory and a 5 on rapid naming, I would say let's put work into the phonemic awareness and get that 37th percentile up to the 50th or higher percentile. That skill is very malleable, so that's quite a reasonable goal. If on the other hand the child got a 9 on the phonological awareness task and the rapid naming was 11 and the working memory was 12, I would say maybe we don't need to do phonemic awareness with that child.
Knowing how they're doing on these other phonological skills can help us understand what type of intervention the child is likely to benefit from. Another issue is that it can help us with determining instructional strategies, particularly with working memory. It seems to me that one of the reasons why in special education there's been such a big emphasis on multi-sensory learning and lots of repetition is because those are two strategies that benefit children that have limited working memory. And, as I'm sure many of you know, a very disproportionate number of individuals who have educationally related difficulties have poor working memory.
The two kind of get associated with each other. If a child does not have difficulties with working memory, the multi-sensory types of techniques and the many repetitions may not be all that useful and helpful for that child. So if you have children with working memory issues, you're going to want to use those kind of techniques to help them where they're not really necessary for children that do not have working memory difficulties. Another issue is that if you're going to consider identifying a student as have a specific learning disability, there are mounds of research data to show that poor working memory and poor rapid naming has a negative impact on reading development. And if you can demonstrate that a child has poor rapid naming, poor working memory, along with other things in the phonological core deficit arena, that builds a stronger and more valid case that the student has a specific learning disability in reading.
I'd like to talk about one of the tasks that seems to stand above all the others in terms of its value for both assessment and intervention. There are many different types of phonological awareness tests. Phonological can refer to multiple levels, the phonemic level being the highest.
The most basic would be things like rhyming and first sound awareness and syllable segmentation. And children develop from there to what's called the onset rhyme level up to the phoneme level. So the phoneme level is the highest.
And within the phoneme level there are easier and harder types of tasks and items. But when we say phonological, we have to realize that there's a wide range of possible levels of difficulty, as well as tasks. We need to avoid getting hung up on tasks.
There are many classic phonological awareness tasks. I just mentioned a couple of them. You've got rhyming, alliteration, you've got segmentation, you have blending, you have categorization, you have manipulation. Tasks don't influence reading. The skill that underlies those tasks is what influences reading.
What you learned from module 4, if you hadn't already known that, is that The skills needed to be a good reader are phonological blending, which is necessary for phonic decoding, and highly proficient access to phonemes, phoneme analysis or phoneme segmentation. And those are the two skills that interact with reading. And the different tasks that have been used in the past have been trying to get at this kind of amorphous concept of phonological processing.
Some tasks do a better job than others. If the only skills are segmentation and blending, why would we pay attention to these other tasks? The problem is that a segmentation task cannot determine if you have segmentation proficiency, or what I call phonemic proficiency. This was discussed in an earlier session. The idea is if I ask a child to segment a word, take a word like task, and the child does t-a-s-k.
Well, you don't know if they have proficiency. You know if they do it quickly or slowly, but if they do it quickly, you don't know if they're just quick at it or if they are proficient. But if you say to a child, say task without the s and the kid says tack, instantly you know that that child has phoneme segmentation proficiency.
Because in under one second, that child did phoneme segmentation, phoneme isolation, he figured out where the s was in that word, phoneme manipulation, he pulled out the s. And then he did phoneme blending. He blended the sounds that were left.
So it's quite arguable that he did not put any conscious attention into segmenting the word task for him to perform that manipulation procedure. Doing manipulation tasks tells us something about reading that simply doing segmentation tasks does not. Now it should be no surprise if that's the case that manipulation tasks tend to correlate higher with reading than other tasks. Segmentation tasks tend to correlate between positive 0.3 and positive 0.5.
Manipulation tasks tend to correlate between positive 0.4 and positive 0.7 and sometimes as high as 0.8. It seems that that correlation is signaling to us that it gives a better read on the underpinnings of the phonology behind reading than segmentation tasks do. An interesting note, and this is a non-scientific opinion, this is just based on my reading of the research literature, but in about the last 10 years in the reading research literature, I rarely see segmentation or categorization, certainly not rhyming or alliteration, used as an index of phonological skills.
Almost always now, in the last 10-15 years, researchers have relied on phonological manipulation tasks, usually deletion, or sometimes substitution. It seems that researchers have kind of stumbled upon the fact that manipulation tasks give us a better understanding or give us more information about the phonological underpinnings of reading than some of the other classic tasks. But unfortunately most of the tests that are out on the market are very task oriented.
Oh, we'll do one blending task, then we'll do a segmentation task, then we'll do a categorization task, then we'll do a manipulation task, then we'll do rhyming, then we'll do alliteration. What are each of those tasks telling you? Each of those tasks are at best trying to get at an underlying phonological skill that interacts with reading.
We now know what those skills are, and manipulation does the best job of getting at those skills. Also, manipulation has the best data for reading intervention. We're going to come back to this in Module 11, but studies have shown that the best progress made in Normed assessments of word reading have come when manipulation training, phonological manipulation training was done.
Not when segmentation was done, not when blending was done. Once again we'll leave that to Module 11. As a result, we can conclude that phonemic manipulation is a superior type of task for getting at the phonological underpinnings of reading, both for assessment as well as for intervention. The other thing is it's theoretically consistent with orthographic learning. And I'm tying back to something I mentioned earlier in this slide, is that it can measure phoneme proficiency in a way that the other tasks can't. And we now know from orthographic learning that it's phoneme proficiency.
It's that instantaneous access to the sounds within the spoken language that help us remember words. In sum, it's important to evaluate... each of the phonological skill deficit areas, all five of them, when we are doing an evaluation of a child that has word reading difficulties. And there are several advantages to evaluating working memory and rapid automatized naming. Phonemic manipulation tasks are the best source of getting at the phonological underpinnings of reading.
It's the only way that we can get at phonemic proficiency and phonemic proficiency is the foundation for building the sight vocabulary. Average performances on such phonological tasks need to be adjusted based upon the larger profile. If a 9 is on the higher end of the child's profile with phonological skills, that's a skill area that you want to work on. If it's on the lower end, it's probably fine.
So how might you design a battery that includes the assessment of phonological skills? Next up, we're going to look at some specific tests for phonological awareness and for blending. Module 6 Introduction to Reading Assessment Assessing Phonological Skills Session 3 Phonological Awareness and Blending Assessment Hello, this is David Kilpatrick, your presenter for these 13 on-demand webinars.
Participants of these webinars will learn research that will have impact on assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Here are the 13 modules. We are now in module 6. Module 6 has three sessions and we are going to be participating in the third session which has to do with phonological awareness and blending assessment. As a result of this particular session.
Participants will be able to determine what are useful tests for phonological awareness and blending, how to interpret results of phonological awareness and blending subtests, and identify some of the problems with existing assessments of these skills. Phonological awareness or phonological sensitivity can be broken down into two broad categories, analysis and synthesis. Analysis means breaking words apart.
Words can be broken apart into syllables, into onsets, into rhymes, into phonemes. Classic analysis tasks include alliteration, rhyming, segmentation, isolation, categorization, and manipulation. Manipulation has several forms, such as manipulating sounds to delete a sound, to substitute a sound, reverse a sound, transpose a sound, pig Latin, spoonerisms, and actually many of the other types of things that you see there, isolation, segmentation, rhyming, there are multiple versions of those tasks as well. In my estimation this analysis is true phonemic awareness.
The reason I say that is because blending, which we'll talk about in just a second, is more about activation. You hear individual sounds and that activates a word. Where awareness Awareness means you're aware of the sounds within a given word.
Synthesis, as mentioned, occurs when parts of words activate a whole word, and that is a blending task most commonly. It could be a matter of blending syllables, blending onsets onto rhymes, or blending phonemes to each other. And far and away the most common task is blending. There have been some incomplete word tasks, but primarily it's blending tasks. Blending is essential for phonic decoding.
This was covered in a great deal of depth in module 4. If you have letter sound knowledge, and you can blend those sounds together, that is the basis for phonic decoding. Analysis is essential for spelling, particularly in terms of words that are phonically regular, but it's also important for helping us remember the words we read. This was covered in Module 4 in a fair degree of depth. Letter sound knowledge.
phoneme analysis allows you to spell phonically regular words. Letter sound proficiency and phonemic proficiency combined allows you to store words very quickly and efficiently through the orthographic mapping process. Blending should be assessed separately from the analysis type tasks, especially in kindergarten through third grade. You're going to find that after third grade it's pretty rare you would even use a blending task.
Phoneme blending skills develop earlier than phoneme level analysis skills. Because of this you're going to find three different patterns. You're going to find some students who are skilled in both phoneme analysis and phoneme blending. And you're going to find students who are weak in both phoneme analysis and phoneme blending. And the third pattern is you're going to find students who are weak in phoneme analysis, but they're not weak in blending.
They may actually be average or above average in blending. But what you're not likely to find is a child who is skilled in phoneme analysis, but very weak in blending. I've evaluated children who are weak in phoneme analysis. I've evaluated children on these types of tasks since the year 2000. And I've evaluated hundreds of children that have reading problems.
And I've evaluated hundreds of children that have typical reading development. but they are part of research studies and I have not found that child yet. The comprehensive test of phonological awareness and the phonological awareness test batteries they both have blending sub tests in them but be very cautious when you include a blending and analysis sub test in the same global composite because what happens is the blending score might kind of neutralize the analysis score so you may have an average or above average blending score being combined as part of a composite score with a low average or below average analysis score I've often had children who on the C top blending words test we get a 10 12 and it's pretty pretty solid score but yet they get seven or six on the elision, which is the analysis task.
And when you combine that, now there's a third test in that composite, but when you combine them, what is happening is you're not allowing each of these skills to tell you where the child is at in terms of their phonological development. And it may mask a significant problem that you're overlooking because you're only looking at the composite. Most weak readers can blend phonemes by the end of second grade.
As I mentioned earlier, past third grade it's pretty rare you ever do a blending type task because even very weak readers, only the most extreme severe phonological core deficit cases, are going to really struggle with blending past second or third grade. Typically developing readers can do phoneme blending by the end of first grade, so there is a lag for the phonological core deficit kids who pick up on it about a year late. So it's important to realize that if a child has average blending skills, that doesn't rule out that they have phonological awareness issues.
We need to distinguish between tasks and the skills that underlie those tasks. Many batteries use multiple tasks. Different analysis tasks, whether it's segmenting, isolating, manipulating, etc., they're not really telling us different things. They're all trying to get at the same underlying phonemic skills for reading.
Some do a better job of that as others. I covered this to a fair degree in the last session. It would not ever make sense to look at various analysis tasks and try to do some sort of subtest scatter, that type of thing.
There really is no theoretical basis for that. I realize that kind of thing goes on in the cognitive assessment literature, but in terms of the theoretical understanding of what phonological skills do for reading, there's no basis for doing that kind of analysis. And when a child is given multiple phonological tasks, I would say, based on the idea of intervention-oriented assessment, I would default to the lowest because there are some tasks that children become good at. For example, a very large portion of phonological core deficit kids will become okay at phoneme segmentation and phoneme blending by second or third grade. But that's a That's an ending first grade skill.
They're still behind. They do not have the same level of phonological awareness that their peers do. It can be misleading for us to get average scores on segmentation tasks or blending tasks and assume the child does not have a problem. If they do a task that's segmentation or isolation and yet they do a manipulation task that's much more much poorer, I would default to that. As mentioned in the previous session, phonemic manipulation is the best.
It has the highest correlation with reading. I'm not going to go back over all those items I said about manipulation, but when you think about it, it manipulation gathers up all the statistical variants of those other ones because it incorporates others. Phoneme manipulation often includes it always has at least three but it may include as many as four different tasks built within it and as mentioned before if you're looking for an instant response if you're looking for paying attention to the speed with which kids respond it's the only way to determine phoneme proficiency. Many test batteries now have phonological awareness subtests which is great.
The CTOP2, the comprehensive test of phonological processing, to me seems like like it's the best source. Here goes another one of those disclaimers. I get nothing for recommending it.
I've been recommending the CTOP ever since I started using it. The original version came out in 1999. I got my copy in 2000. I've used it with hundreds and hundreds of children. One of the advantages of the CTOP is in addition to phonological awareness it has tests of working memory and rapid automatized naming and they're all normed on the same children. But at the same time we want to pay attention to subtests.
Most importantly we want to look at the individual subtests blending if it's a problem or not. Oftentimes it's not. but we want to look at the elision subtest, the analysis test. Now it also has an isolation test where you have to identify where you're hearing the sound within the word. You want to look at those individual subtests and you want to come up with other subtests that are parallel for this issue of subtest reliability.
The phonological awareness test and its second edition put out by Linguist Systems may be a useful supplement to the CTOP2. The problem is it only goes to age 9. The CTOP goes right up into adulthood. Another issue with the phonological awareness test is that there's... there's not consistency between the standard scores and the percentile rankings.
And those of you who are familiar with standard scores and percentile rankings are going to be puzzled by that. And it's understandable. What I would recommend, based on intervention-oriented assessment, we're not talking about determining a learning disability, is to default to the lower of the two. It's better to have a false positive than a false negative. So if you have a false positive, you start working with children on phoneme tasks, and they take right off, eh, maybe the test wasn't accurate.
But a false negative is a problem because it's going to have a... a negative impact on the child in terms of acquiring the reading skills that they need. The phonological awareness screening test, the PAST, not to be confused with another phonological test with the same acronym, that's called the phonological awareness skills test. If you do an internet search that's going to come up.
Both of these are free and that's what partly makes it confusing. The phonological awareness skills test does the conventional task oriented approach. It's got some blending and some segmenting and some deletion, et cetera, et cetera.
It can't determine phoneme proficiency. There is no timing element. The past is standardized.
The past phonological on a screening test that I'm recommending here is standardized. It's not norm. By the way, my name is on the past. It's a totally free test so I'm not making any money off of it. It originally started life as the Rosner and Simon auditory analysis task and a guy by the name of McGinnis updated it and McGinnis and I were in the process of updating this when he passed away and so I made some modifications to it.
The major modification for our purposes is I added the timing element to get at phoneme proficiency. The PASS can be used to supplement the CTOP2 or the phonological awareness test 2 or another norm test. Over the years I used both the PASS and the CTOP. And nine times out of ten, they were consistent with one another. It was very rare that I saw a discrepancy where a child did fine on one and did poorly on the other.
And as mentioned, the PAST is the only test that can get at phoneme proficiency. There's some rumors that hopefully coming out on the market, one of the major test batteries will have something like this. But at the time that I'm creating these webinars, the only thing available that I know of is the PAST.
Now don't be confused with the timed phonological awareness that you see in the universal batteries. You have... timed segmentation tasks on some of the batteries. Well time segmentation that's a conscious task so and it only takes you out to the ending of the first grade level but the past will take you to you know second third fourth grade level and basically an adult level.
I've used the past on hundreds of kids from kindergarten through college and once you get to about third fourth grade third and fourth graders are no different from fifth graders who are virtually no different from high schoolers which are no different from college students. So what happens is that there's a steep growth in this skill from kindergarten right up through about about third grade and then it levels off. And there was a very large study that did the same kind of manipulation task you find in the past and also had a similar timing element. They did it with 1,400 kids from first grade up to sixth grade and they saw the same steep increase in raw scores and leveling off.
Theirs leveled off just a little bit higher up than I have found. They used a different test but very similar. As mentioned, it's free to use but it requires a careful reading of the instructions. My concern with a test that's now out there and available for anybody is that people don't use it properly.
And if you don't use it properly, what's it telling you? In a number of pilot studies, there's at least five studies I've done where I used the PAST and the C-Top Elision subtest in the same test. And in every single case, the PAST correlated with reading as high, but in many cases higher, than the C-Top Elision.
They historically are close cousins. Both the Elision and the PAST are derived from the Rosmer and Simon test that I mentioned earlier. In summary, there are several different tests available for phonemic blending and phonemic awareness.
Reading and analysis tests should not be used in the same way. not be combined and confused. And many struggling readers are gonna be able to blend, but they're not necessarily gonna be good at pulling words apart. So if they can blend, that means they are now candidates for doing phonic decoding. But that doesn't mean they're far enough along to be good at orthographic mapping and remembering the words they learned.
Think back to module four, where we looked at the development of phonological skills. And you see that the ability to do phonic decoding precedes the ability to efficiently add words to the sight vocabulary. And phony manipulation tasks are really the best in terms of of evaluating phonemic proficiency that underlies skilled reading. How have you been evaluating phonemic awareness? And if you haven't been evaluating phonemic awareness, what might you do differently?
Next up is module 7 and we're going to be looking at assessing letter sound skills and phonics skills.