Assessment
This module focuses on the role of structured literacy assessment within an inclusive teaching framework, emphasising the importance of monitoring children's progress to ensure strong foundational skill development and challenge for all learners.
Learning objectives
Once you’ve successfully completed this module, you’ll be able to:
- Understand the purpose of structured literacy assessment.
- Apply key principles of structured literacy assessment to your own assessment practices.
- Understand how digital technologies can enhance literacy assessment.
- Apply your knowledge of structured literacy assessment to your own group of learners.
- Understand how to use assessment data to monitor progress and celebrate student success.
- Make data-driven decisions on learners who require additional support.
These assessments focus on the most predictive components of early literacy development. More than just a checkpoint, the BSLA assessments are a dynamic tool to inform teaching, monitor growth, and celebrate learning. With engaging, child-friendly formats and powerful online reporting tools, they also support educators by streamlining analysis and enabling responsive teaching.
Principle 1: Assessments target underlying cognitive linguistic skills
Assessment for Year 4-8 includes:
- Reading comprehension
- Morphology and orthographic patterns
- Spelling
- Other tasks
Principle 2: Assessments are strengths-based
Assessments are Strengths-Based
- We focus on what children can achieve and identify their next steps for learning. We expect children to succeed.
- We consider the learning conditions, teaching practices, and the family and community support that will lead to success.
- We celebrate children’s success with them and their whānau.
- We acknowledge teachers’ and literacy specialists’ efforts in accelerating children’s literacy skills.
Principle 3: Assessments are accessible to all learners
And as we should support students, those with complex communication and learning needs can still achieve using this model.
Principle 4: Assessments are valid and reliable
Validity: Measuring what matters
Validity refers to whether an assessment measures what it is intended to measure. In literacy assessment, a valid tool should accurately capture a student’s reading, writing, oral language, or comprehension skills rather than being influenced by unrelated factors.
- Was the score of 0 words correctly spelt a valid measure of this student’s spelling skills?
- How could the teacher adapt the spelling task to measure this student’s spelling ability in a more valid way?
Reliability: Consistency over time
Reliability refers to the consistency of assessment results - if a student completed the same test on two separate occasions a few days apart (without intervention or teaching in between the assessment trials), would they get similar results? A reliable assessment ensures that differences in scores reflect actual differences in literacy ability, not inconsistencies in administering or scoring the task.
Let’s think about the impact that the style of presentation may have on the reliability of the assessment data.
- Does one teacher’s use of expressive intonation, pauses, and emphasis enhance the student’s comprehension more than the other teacher’s neutral delivery?
- Could differences in articulation and pacing influence how well the student understands and recalls the story?
- Does the presence of visual prompts (e.g., pictures) in one approach provide an advantage in memory and sequencing compared to the other approach, which relies solely on auditory recall?
- Does prompting style affect the depth and detail of the student’s retell, with one teacher offering subtle encouragement while the other provides no additional guidance?
- How do variations in teacher transcription affect the assessment outcome? Is one teacher more likely to capture subtle details of the student’s language production than the other?
Use of digital technologies in assessment
In today’s classrooms, digital technology is reshaping the way we assess literacy skills, offering new opportunities to gather rich, reliable data while making assessment more efficient and accessible. However, with these advancements come important questions: How can we ensure that digital assessments are valid and reliable? How can technology streamline the process without compromising accuracy? And how can we make sure digital tools work for all students, including those with additional needs?
Digital assessment tools can improve assessment reliability and validity by:
- Providing consistent, automated scoring, reducing the risk of examiner error in scoring individual items or calculating total scores.
- Offering clear, structured instructions so all students experience the test in the same way.
- Improving digital record keeping and data tracking, allowing for easy management of multiple assessments and timepoints.
- Adapting assessments in the moment to ensure they are appropriate to individual student needs, for example advancing them on to more complex test items based on their score in easier items.
Using technology to adapt assessment for diverse learners
Every student brings unique strengths, challenges, and learning needs to the classroom. Effective literacy assessment must be flexible and inclusive, ensuring that all learners—including those with additional learning needs—can demonstrate their abilities fairly and accurately. Digital technologies provide powerful tools to customise assessments, removing barriers and creating more accessible, equitable experiences for all students.
There are many different adaptations that can be made to digital assessment tasks, to ensure all learners can access them.
- Reducing amount of response options to reduce cognitive overload.
- Changing font colour for visual needs.
- Considering how responses can be made with alternative communication systems.
- Slowing time required to make a response for students’ requiring more processing time.
Assessment for Year 4-8
Assessment Tasks
- Assessment for Learning (AfL) involves providing clear learning goals, objectives/intentions and success criteria, explicit feedback (teacher & peer), and opportunities to share and reflect on learning. These underpin the teaching and learning process and are an integral part of a structured literacy lesson.
- Assessment of Learning (AoL) involves using assessment information to evaluate current skills and knowledge, identify next learning steps, plan teaching, and monitor progress. AoL often involves the use of assessment tasks and tools, which can also be used to support AfL practices.
Years 4-8 PhOM Assessment consists of two tasks:
- A processing task for spelling: A multiple-choice task requiring students to select the word that demonstrates the correct spelling of the target morpheme, e.g., Choose the word with the correct spelling: international – intanational – intinational – intternational
- A processing task for meaning: A multiple-choice task requiring students to select the meaning that corresponds to the target morpheme in the word, e.g., The United Nations is an international organisation. What does inter mean in the word international? (between-within-under-across).
The PhOM Assessments for Years 4-8, are linked to each Taumata.
Each are designed to be administered prior to, and after, the teaching of the respective taumata. These PhOM Assessments consist of 10 items each, where each item comprises both a judgement task and processing task (as above) for the 8 morphemes taught in each of these taumata. There are two additional morphemes within the BSLA PhOM Assessment for Taumata 10, 13 and 16 which are untaught targets, and which have been selected from the BSLA Year 4 reading comprehension texts.
Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of effective literacy instruction – it requires a student to draw together their decoding (word reading) and knowledge of language to understand passages of text. Reading comprehension forms a core aspect of BSLA teaching in Years 4-8.
And we can still use PROBE to assess Reading Comprehension.
Choosing a Starting Point
Year level expectations, select the starting Taumata for teaching as outlined below:
- Taumata 10 aligned to reading materials for Year 4 learners
- Taumata 13 aligned to reading materials for Year 5 learners
- Taumata 16 aligned to reading materials for Year 6 learners
For learners working below their age expected reading level, more focused teaching will be required in the small group building block, to fill knowledge gaps.
Assessment Scheduling
Regular assessment enables teachers to track growth over time and to identify next steps for learning for each child. Critically, it also allows early identification of students who require additional support at Tier 2.
Ultimately, you need to develop an assessment schedule that:
- Meets the needs of your students by providing timely, relevant information to guide teaching and support learning.
- Aligns with your school’s reporting timelines to ensure assessment data is available for formal reports to whānau, school leaders, and other stakeholders.
- Enables ongoing monitoring of student progress, helping you make informed decisions about next teaching steps and measure learning growth over time.
- Identifies students who require additional support, allowing early intervention and targeted teaching to meet diverse learning need
Using data to monitor progress and identify next steps for teaching
Assessment data is a powerful tool not only for identifying areas of need but also for tracking progress and celebrating success.
Regular progress monitoring helps educators determine whether students are on track, require adjustments in instruction, or need additional support through Tier 2 interventions. At the same time, it allows for meaningful celebrations of growth, whether through personal goal setting, sharing progress with families, or acknowledging whole-class improvements.
After completing 10 weeks of BSLA teaching, your next step will be to collect further assessment data, to monitor student progress and determine next steps for learning. This is an exciting time!
Strengths-based progress monitoring
Early literacy assessment data, when interpreted through a strengths-based lens, offers valuable insights into each child’s unique capabilities and learning trajectory. Rather than focusing solely on deficits or what children cannot yet do, educators can use assessment results to identify existing skills, emerging competencies, and individual learning preferences. By highlighting and building upon these strengths, such as morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, or spelling ability, educators can tailor instruction to reinforce what is already working well for the child. This approach fosters motivation, engagement, and confidence, creating a more supportive and inclusive learning environment where progress is recognized holistically.
When examining your assessment data for progress, consider the following as indicators of student progress:
- Better engagement in the assessment tasks overall.
- Change in raw score from 1st to 2nd assessment point.
- An increase in the ability to identify the meaning of target morphemes.
- An increase in accuracy of reading and/or spelling short words at the grapheme level. For example, is the child now able to represent more initial sounds? More final sounds? More vowels?
- An increase in the ability to read with a greater degree of fluency and accuracy.
- Greater skill at using specific reading comprehension strategies to answer comprehension questions from a passage of text.
You can then use this progress to celebrate success and specify next steps for learning. For example:
- The student demonstrates good understanding of correct spelling of target morphemes and will now focus on building a deeper understand of the meaning of these morphemes in a sentence.
- The student is able to read short passages of text with increasing fluency and accuracy and will now focus on applying reading comprehension strategies to understand the text’s content.
- The student has consolidated the application of simpler (answering literal questions; Right There) reading comprehension skills and will now work on using more complex comprehension skills (making text-based inferences; Think and Search) when reading.
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