LibGuides: Foundations of Literacy Digital Reference Tool: Assessment-Instruction Cycle

General

Here's a review of the four basic types of assessment:

Where to Find Free Literacy Assessments

EasyCBM
EasyCBM requires you to create an account, but it's all free. Measures available without a paid subscription include Letter Names, Letter Sounds, Phoneme Segmenting, Word Reading Fluency, Passage Reading Fluency, and Proficient Reading. All assessments are short timed, usually 60 seconds. Student and Assessor Copies are available for download. Multiple versions of each measure at each grade level are provided so you can engage in progress monitoring.
DIBELS 8
This battery of assessments was created by the University of Oregon. This is the 8th edition. The benchmark materials and scoring booklets are available for download as PDFs. Measures include Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation, Word Reading Fluency, Nonsense Word Fluency, Oral Reading Fluency, and Maze (Comprehension). Training Videos are provided at the bottom of the home page.

What Do I Do After Assessment? Ask Lola!

Ask Lola: An AI Instructional Coach for the Science of Reading
This chat platform created by Project Read offers help with lesson planning, assessment and implementation of structured literacy in your classroom, or general questions related to Science of Reading. It works like other chat systems (Gemini, Chat GPT, etc.) so it's simple and fast.

You'll be asked to create an account, but the account is free.

Core Components of Literacy Instruction K-5

Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade

The What Works Clearinghouse created a Practice Guide (2016) that provides recommendations for teaching K-3 foundational reading skills. The recommendations are:

Teach students academic language skills, including the use of inferential and narrative language, and vocabulary knowledge.
Develop awareness of the segments of sounds in speech and how they link to letters.
Teach students to decode words, analyze word parts, and write and recognize words.
Ensure that each student reads connected text every day to support reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension.

For each recommendation, there are implementation steps and solutions for potential challenges. There's also a summary and rating of the supporting evidence (e.g., minimal, moderate, or strong).

The guide is long (123 pages!), so they also offer a summary, which can be found here.

Core Components of Instruction

If you've ever wondered what literacy components are focused on at different grade levels in elementary schools, this visual should be helpful. Use it to determine where literacy instructional emphasis changes year to year, which can be particularly helpful if you suspect students may have missed out on critical literacy learning from prior grades OR if you have determined that students are ready to move ahead to more challenging work.

Here's another visualization of literacy foundational skills by year. This one extends to identify more specific phonics and grammar skills - which might be critical as you focus on the intermediate grades in elementary.

You may need to zoom in! Or you can click this link to visit the page in a new window.

NC ELA Standards

When planning for literacy instruction, you should always make sure your work is related to standards.

Here's where to find the NC ELA Standards:

NCDPI also developed guides that further explain each standard. Each guide is devoted to a specific grade level.

In the guides, the standards are defined to explain what students should know and be able to do. They also provide clarifications which include an explanation of each standard, ideas for instruction, and examples. A glossary of bolded terms accompanies the clarifications. Finally, they provide ideas for “In the Classroom.” Here are links to the Kindergarten and First Grade versions.