Fluency Open Court Reading Sight Words by Mathew Needleman

Beginning of the Year Pre-Assessments

Here are a few tools to use when assessing students at the beginning of the year:

The Basic Phonics Skills Test (BPST)
This is helpful in identifying specific areas of phonics need (short vowels, long vowels, digraphs, etc.)

San Diego Quick Assessment
It’s also important to know students’ knowledge of sight words which is an almost completely separate skill from decoding and an almost equal predictor of reading success.

Yopp-Singer
Test of phoneme segmentation

DIBELS
provides several free fluency passages as well as comprehension assessments

What pre-assessments do you use?

4 thoughts on “Beginning of the Year Pre-Assessments”

  2. Great Post ~ it is certainly that time of year for the mighty pre-assessments. In fifth grade we have tried DIBELS last year but I am not certain it is as effective as other assessments, at least for the fifth grade level. We will use it again this year as well as running records, and a previous State Test.

    I am very interested to know what others use as well, especially at the fifth grade level.

    Thanks again for this post.

    John

  3. We are looking to tighten up our pre-assessments for the beginning of the year. Third grade is a “retention” year in our state and our grade level is often the dumping ground after primary “pushing on.” Currently, besides a teacher-created pre-assessment, we use a state test that is administered on the computer. So, thank you for these guidelines.

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