Running head: STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 1

Student Assessment Project

Bridget Delaney
EDU 325
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Student Assessment Project

Emilia is an eleven-year-old 4th grader with Down syndrome. She is the second to

youngest of eight children. All of her siblings are typically developing, however two of them

have dyslexia. Emilia is enrolled in the special education program of her homeschool curriculum

and her mother is her primary teacher. Additionally, she receives speech therapy once a week at

a local therapy center for people with ranging disabilities. Her physical and academic abilities

resemble those of an average child a few grades below her, however this is average for a child

with Down syndrome. Emilia is very social and good at making friends. Although her speech is

sometimes slurred or grammatically incorrect, she has almost no difficulty communicating with

her family members and close friends as they have come to understand her quite well.

Unlike many children her age, Emilia often enjoys her schoolwork. Of all her subject areas,

math seems to be the most difficult for her. Reading, however, tends to be her stronger suit,

particularly identifying letters and sight words. This is a common strength among many children

with Down syndrome. In the past she has struggled more with phonemic awareness, but has

begun to read phonetically this current school year and is continually progressing. She is still

below the average grade level for those her age, but is essentially on track with her special

education program.

Emilia was recently given a reading assessment. The assessor used the Dynamic Indicators

of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) Next Reading Assessment to determine the reading

exercises Emilia can successfully complete as well as the ones with which she tends to struggle.

Her reading level best fits the Kindergarten exercises of the DIBELS Next Reading Assessment.

Overall, she willingly participated in the assessment and it helped the assessor to better see
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which reading areas Emilia needs more improvement. The main goal Emilia’s parents have for

her regarding reading and speech is to be able to sound out words on her own, read sentences

more accurately, and develop clearer speech so that she may better communicate with those

outside her own family.

Procedures

After emailing Emilia’s mother and receiving permission to administer a DIBELS Next

assessment on her, we found a time over my spring break that worked well for all of us. Emilia’s

mother provided me with basic academic related background information about Emilia and I

went to her house on March 13, 2018 to administer the assessment. Right away, Emilia was

willing and excited to complete the assessment, although she knew nothing about it other than

the fact that she was going to read for me. I chose to administer the assessment in the basement

of Emilia’s house as it was one of the only rooms that was quiet and secluded from the rest of the

family activity.

Once we were in the basement, I invited Emilia to join me at the table and she did so

willingly. Before beginning the assessment, I asked Emilia if she liked reading and if she would

like to do some reading for me to which she willingly complied. We began with the First Sound

Fluency (FSF) assessment. For this assessment, the instructor reads three practice words and asks

the student to identify the first sound in the word. For example, if the instructor asks for the first

sound in the word ​man​ the student would ideally respond by giving an /mmm/ sound. The

instructor begins the real assessment by reading off a list of words and asking the student to

identify the first sound for each word. I read the scripted instructions in the DIBELS booklet,

however I was sure to read them very clear and at a bit of slower rate so Emilia could understand
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what I was asking her to do. Emilia sounded out the first two practice words incorrectly but gave

the correct sound for the third word. Then I started my one minute timer and began the test.

Right away, Emilia got the first couple sounds incorrect. Rather than giving the first sound of the

word, she would simply repeat the word I said. I reminded Emilia a couple times that she was not

to repeat the word, but to give me the first sound. She nodded her head as if she understood, yet

she still continued to repeat the words. After about five incorrect words, I stopped the test.

Next, I administered the Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) assessment. In this assessment, the

student uses his or her finger to point to letters from left to right on horizontal rows and say each

letter’s name. I placed the page of letters in front of Emilia and read the instructions to her. Once

I started the timer and we began the test, Emilia pointed to the letters in the right direction, but

was saying their sounds rather than their names. I reminded Emilia to say the letter names, and

she finally did on the last letter in the first row. After the first row, she seemed confused where to

start and began giving random letter names, so I had to remind her to begin on the left of the next

row. Once she did, she said many of the correct letter names, only giving the sounds for a few.

After a minute I ended the test.

Then I administered a new FSF assessment, but Emilia and I both went through almost the

exact same procedures as we did the first time she took the test. The only difference was that she

was able to give the first sound of two of the practice words rather than only one. However, she

still continued to repeat the words I gave her instead of tell me their first sounds. After the

second FSF test, I gave her a new LNF assessment. Her performance was slightly lower this

time, as she tended to give more sounds rather than names towards the end of the test.
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I then administered the Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) assessment. This assessment

involves the instructor saying a word and a student saying each sound in the word. For example,

if the instructor were to say the word ​soap,​ the student would ideally respond by saying the

sounds /s/, /oa/, and /p/. Emilia did not seem to understand the instructions for this test, even

though I gave them as clearly as I could. I would say the words provided in the test, but she

would simply repeat the word, even when I reminded her to only give me the sounds. After she

gave five incorrect responses, I stopped the test.

Next, I gave the Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) assessment, which consists of the student

reading short nonsense words, or simply giving the sounds of each letter in the nonsense word.

For example, when presented with the nonsense word ​mip​, the student would ideally read the

whole word. However, if the student cannot read the whole word, then he or she would ideally

give as many sounds in the word he or she knows. For the practice words, Emilia only said the

sounds of the words and did not read the whole words. When we began the test, Emilia gave

most of the correct letter sounds in the words, but only read the whole words for the last two

words of the test, even though I had reminded her to try to read whole words. She did, however,

blend two of three letters together in some of the words.

Then I administered a new LNF assessment. Emilia performed similarly on this test as she

did on the other LNF tests, naming most of the letters correctly. By this point, Emilia seemed to

have lost some interest in the whole assessment. She asked a few times if we could go play

upstairs and I said we could after she finished her reading with me. I then administered a new

PSF assessment. Not only did she respond incorrectly to the practice word, but every single one

of the words she was presented with on the assessment. Perhaps it was partially due to the fact
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that she seemed to be less interested and motivated in the assessment. However, I did my best to

keep her engaged and interested for the remainder of the test by reminding her we could play

with her toys if she read her best for me.

Finally, we reached the last test. I administered a new NWF test and she performed

similarly to the last NWF in which she sounded out many of the letter words correctly but had

more trouble blending entire words. She did, however, improve with blending two letters

together more frequently than she had on the last NWF test. When the assessment was over, I

thanked Emilia for reading with me, giving her a high-five, and then promised to go upstairs and

play with her as a reward.

Assessments Given

DIBELS Next assessment is a Curriculum Based Measure (CBM) that helps teachers to

know students’ performance levels and how they compare with those of their peers. It also helps

them to determine which tier of the Response to Intervention (RTI) program is appropriate for

each student to receive instruction and/or intervention. DIBELS assessments covers five reading

pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. There

are seven different assessments DIBELS uses that covers these five reading pillars. Four of the

seven assessments are used for the Kindergarten tests: FSF, LNF, PSF, and NWF.

The first assessment, FSF, involves students hearing a word from their instructor and

identifying the first sound in that word (e.g. /s/ in​ sun)​ . This assesses phonemic awareness which

involves isolating, segmenting, or blending phonemes (Cummings,​ ​Kaminski,​ ​Good, & O’Neil,

2011). FSF is known to be a more recent and effective means of assessing phonemic awareness

because it involves students isolating sounds that are presented blended within a whole word
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(Cummings et al., 2011). It is also timed, which leaves less room for the student to guess and

more accurate scoring for the administers (Cummings et al., 2011).

The second assessment, LNF, involves students seeing a letter, either upper or lowercase,

and naming it rather than saying its sound. This assessment strengthens a student’s phonemic

awareness and early literacy development as well as his or her ability to partake in literacy

activities (Clemens, Lai, Burke, & Wu, 2017). Learning letter names is important because it not

only helps one to better predict and understand letter sounds, but it is also usually taught before

letter sounds are taught (Clemens et al., 2017). Thus, it leads to an easier association between

letter names and sounds (Clemens et al., 2017).

The third assessment is PSF, which involves an instructor saying a word and a student

sounding out and saying each individual sound within the word (e.g. /t/ /r/ /i/ /p/ in the word

trip)​ . This assesses phonemic awareness and a student’s ability to produce phonemes out of

three- to four-phoneme words (Powell-Smith & Cummings, 2007). PSF is known to positively

influence reading outcomes as a student learns to know words not merely through memorization,

but by breaking them down and sounding out each phoneme (Powell-Smith & Cummings, 2007).

It helps them to better understand what makes up a word and why it sounds the way it does.

The fourth assessment, NWF, involves students reading two- to three-letter, made up, or

nonsense, words (e.g. ​sut,​ ​ kiz​, ​es)​ . If a student cannot read a whole nonsense word, he or she is

encouraged to sound out individual letters within the word. This assesses phonemic awareness

and fluency as well as a student’s ability to make connections between the structure of a word

and the sounds of its letters (Fien, Park, Baker, Mercier Smith, Stoolmiller, & Kame’enui, 2010).

It primarily shows an instructor whether a student understands the correspondence between

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letters and their sounds well enough to successfully read nonsense words and whether he or she

is able to blend sounds together to form a word (Fien et al., 2010).

Results & Analysis

For the FSF assessments, Emilia resulted with a score of zero for both. She essentially

had the same issue on both assessments of repeating the given word rather than saying the first

sound of the word. This may mean that Emilia either has difficulty identifying the first sound in a

word or simply has difficulty understanding explicit, scripted instructions. The benchmark score

for Kindergarten FSF is 10+. Needless to say, Emilia is well below the benchmark for this

assessment, being in the 15th percentile.

For the LNF assessments, Emilia received a score of 22 on the first test, a 20 on the

second, and a 21 on the third. In the beginning of the first test she seemed to have a bit of

difficulty understanding that she was to say the letter name rather than the sound. However, after

being reminded of the goal she was able to follow the instructions. The Kindergarten LNF has a

benchmark of 11, which shows that Emilia was well above the benchmark for this assessment.

This puts her in the 55th percentile for LNF, a significant difference from her percentile for FSF.

For the PSF assessments, Emilia resulted with a score of zero for both tests. Similar to

her performance for FSF, Emilia did not seem to understand the scripted instructions, not even

for the practice words. Rather than sounding out each given word, she simply repeated the word

each time on both PSF assessments. The Kindergarten PSF benchmark is 20+, which puts Emilia

well below the benchmark and in the 1st percentile.

For the first NWF assessment, Emilia resulted with a Correct Letter Sounds (CLS) score

of 24. This means that she was able to give twenty-four correct letter sounds of the fifteen two to
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three letter words she saw during the one minute test. Her Whole Words Read (WWR) score was

2, which means of the fifteen nonsense words she saw, she was able to read two full words. For

the second NWF assessment, she had a CLS score of 36 and a WWR score of 2. It is difficult to

say how well Emilia understood the directions of this assessment. She was able to read a few of

the nonsense words as well as blend two letters of a word together, such as -​im​ in ​bim​. Otherwise

her performance seemed to be somewhat random. Sometimes she would attempt to read a whole

word, other times she would attempt to sound out each individual letter, and other times she

would say a completely different word or sound. It is also important to note that the NWF

assessments are near the end of the DIBELS assessments. By the end of the whole assessment,

Emilia was appearing to lose interest and asked to go play with her toys. This could have

affected her scores as she may not have been as focused on the assessment as she was in the

beginning. The Kindergarten NWF-CLS benchmark is 17+ which puts Emilia above the

benchmark and in the 50th percentile. Although optional, the Kindergarten NWF-WWR

benchmark is 3. This puts Emilia in the 50th percentile.

Overall, Emilia performed average or above average on approximately half of the

assessments, and well below average on the other half. It is important to note that the

assessments she did not perform well on were oral based, in which she could not see the given

word in front of her. On the other hand, the assessments that she performed average or well in

contained words or letters she could physically see in front of her. In consideration of this, is

seems as though the primary areas Emilia struggles with are oral usage of phonics, understanding

specific instructions and isolating and identifying particular sounds in words. However, it seems

as though she is more skilled at identifying letter names and sounds, blending letter sounds, and
STUDENT ASSESSMENT PROJECT 10

reading short words, all which she can visually see. Graph 1 represents Emilia’s overall

performance for each assessment compared to the average benchmark for each assessment.

Graph 1.​ Emilia’s average performance on DIBELS compared to benchmark averages.

Areas Targeted for Improvement

One area targeted for improvement is Emilia’s difficulty with isolating and blending

letter sounds in a word she cannot visually see. For example, asking her to name the first sound

in the word ​dog​, but not showing her a visual of the word seems to confuse her and causes her to

simply repeat the word. However, this difficulty makes sense since many children are visual

learners (Cihon, Gardner, Morrison, & Paul, 2008). In fact, studies have shown that children not
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only learn the rules of phonics more accurately, but learn to read better overall when taught

phonics in a visual way (Narr & Cawthon, 2010). This is especially true for children who have

Down syndrome and other disabilities (Narr & Cawthon, 2010). Although DIBELS Next

contains non-visual assessment exercises, it does not necessarily mean that it is an effective way

to teach reading, but it is simply an assessment to perhaps help instructors determine if a student

needs more visual aids. One strategy instructors can use to incorporate the teaching of phonics

visually is See the Sound/Visual Phonics (STS/VP) (Cihon et al., 2008). STS/VP is an

intervention tool that designates a hand sign for each phoneme of the English language, rather

than for every word of the English language as sign language would (Cihon et al., 2008). The

hand signs are typically used in a way that imitates the movements of the mouth, tongue and

throat when saying certain sounds (Cihon et al., 2008). Teachers can also choose to write out the

hand signs under challenging letter sounds or complicated spellings as an additional support to

struggling readers (Cihon et al., 2008). Through this, students will learn to associate sounds with

visual signs, so when they see a sign on its own or under a certain letter, he or she will ideally

make the connection to understand the correct sound of a specific letter (Cihon et al., 2008).

Studies have shown this strategy to positively influence the performance levels of all

kindergarteners and first grade participants in word reading, pseudoword reading, and reading

comprehension (Cihon et al., 2008). One way progress could be monitored is by use of a graph.

Emilia’s teacher could record performance on a set of words Emilia is presented with each day of

the week. At the end of the week, Emilia’s teacher could transfer her records to a graph that

contains an aimpoint and shows any fluctuation of Emilia’s performance throughout the week.
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Another strategy that could be used for Emilia’s targeted area is to promote visual word

recognition through making characters of objects out of word structures (Sauval, Casalis, &

Perre, 2017). This not only makes the learning of words a more aesthetic and fun experience for

children, but it also greatly promotes the use of visual phonological processing rather than

auditory (Sauval et al., 2017). For most learners, this method of learning is usually more likely to

stay within a child’s long-term memory than any method of auditory word recognition (Sauval et

al., 2017). One specific program that could be used for this is the Preschool Prep Company

program. This program has received over one-hundred awards and has created a variety of

DVDs, each focusing on an aspect of phonics, colors, numbers, or shapes. The lessons in the

DVDs are quite simple in that they transform a word into a character, multiple characters, or an

object using the structure of each letter to add to the shape of a character. For example, the word

all​ is transformed into a person eating sushi in which the​ a​ is the character and the two ​l​’s are his

chopsticks. For Emilia’s case, the DVD on letters and words may be highly beneficial for her. A

way to monitor her progress would be to use the flashcards made by the Preschool Prep

Company that contain the same letter and word characters that are featured in the DVDs.

Emilia’s teacher could quiz Emilia on the words displayed on the flashcards and record her

progress each week.

Another area targeted for improvement is Emilia’s difficulty with segmenting phonemes.

This difficulty was shown clearly through her FSF and her PSF test performances as she

struggled to isolate the first sounds in a list of given words as well as segment whole words into

their individual phonemes. One strategy that could be used to help Emilia overcome this

difficulty is the use of picture cards to practice the segmentation of phonemes. In this exercise, a
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student is asked to first draw a picture, provide a word for the picture, and then try to segment

the phonemes within the provided word. The student also uses a chart to color in the number of

phonemes he or she hears in each word. This is important not only to practice matching words to

pictures, but also to better understand that every word contains elements that can also be used in

other words with other elements, creating new blended sounds (Murray, 1994). This exercise

also shows students that phonemes are not intended to be used on their own, but must be used

with a combination of other phonemes which may lead to an interest in creating words of their

own (Murray, 1994). For this strategy, Emilia’s progress can be monitored by her teacher

collecting and comparing picture word charts Emilia has made over the span of a few weeks.

Another strategy that could be used to overcome this difficulty of Emilia’s is the “Mail a

Package” game (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). This game focusing on segmenting words before saying

the whole word, rather than saying the whole word before segmenting it as one would in a PSF

DIBELS assessment (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). In this game, there is an empty package in the center

of a room and a student is given one or multiple picture cards, depending on how many students

are participating (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). The teacher says one of the words represented by a

picture card by segmenting the word into phonemes rather than saying the whole world (e.g. /fl/

/ag/) (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). When a student hears the phonemes of the word represented by one

of his or her picture cards, he or she holds the car up, repeats the segmentation, then says the

whole word (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). The student would then place his or her card in the package

(Yopp & Yopp, 2000). This activity is useful for recognizing the phonemic sounds of a word

before coming to know the whole word (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). It oftentimes seems difficult for

some students to break down the phonemes within a word after hearing the whole word (Yopp &
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Yopp, 2000). Instead, this strategy requires students to listen for the sounds of a word and have

the ability to blend the sounds together to create a word (Yopp & Yopp, 2000). Progress

monitoring could be done through observation by the instructor. An instructor may choose to

play this game with her students daily or weekly and use it to observe which students are able to

segment phonemes prior to saying a whole word and which ones still struggle.

Conclusion

Overall, Emilia performed well on her DIBELS Next assessment approximately half of

the time, LNF and NWF being her stronger assessment areas. This puts her above the average

benchmark score for two of the four assessments given and below the benchmark for the other

two assessments. She was easy and enjoyable to work with and I see much potential for her

improvement in isolating and segmenting letter sounds. Through this experience of using CBM

to assess Emilia’s reading abilities, one aspect of CBM that I find to be of importance is the

significance of frequent assessment of a student to determine which skills are his or her strong

suit and which ones need improvement or intervention. I also find the aspect of using baseline

data and benchmarks to determine how students compare to their peers and how they are

progressing towards their goal to be important as well. DIBELS Next as a form of CBM is

primarily a tool to help students reach their fullest potential as soon as possible, and it is my hope

that this will be the case for Emilia.

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