Year 1 Phonics Check: Analysing individual student reports: Q&A transcript
Q: Are there other kinds of reports generated in the Check, beyond the individual reports?
Rebecca McEwan:
Yes, absolutely. As well as looking at the summary report and the details report for an individual student, you can also on the reporting screen – so you'll click on the reporting tab – and then before you search for any particular student, you can just click on ‘View results by distribution of answer’. There's a little checkbox, it's the only checkbox. What that will bring up is your whole-class view, and that will have all the words from the Phonics Check, and then it'll show the student scores, so you'll be able to look at those score indicators. It has ticks for the ‘Got it!’ words and a mark for the ‘Not yet’ words, so that gives you that broader overview of your class results.
Elaine Stanley:
Q: How often can you do the Phonics Check with students? What's the advice around that?
Rebecca McEwan:
Our advice is that the Year 1 Phonics Check can be run in Term 1 and Term 3 of a year, ideally, so then you're getting some initial information at the beginning of the year to base your instruction on, and you'll have that Term 3 read on how your students have progressed since Term 1. It also gives you some time to respond to those needs that are presented the second time around.
Two times would be the maximum that I would recommend running the Phonics Check in a year.
If you've responded to your results and you’re looking for a way to assess whether your response has been effective, you can also think about specific assessment based on what you've been teaching. Really that's what you’re wanting to know, has your instruction focused on those areas of need been effective? In that case, you can be looking at, can the student say the sound when you present them with the grapheme or the letter–sound correspondence, the letter, digraph, trigraph, whatever it is. Can they write down that letter–sound correspondence if you say the sound? Can they write the letters down to match? Can they read and can they spell words with that grapheme. I keep using different words, sorry. I'm talking about either the single letter–sound correspondence, the digraph or the trigraph there. Can they read and spell with it? And, you would also be supporting your student at sentence level in your instruction. Can they actually read and write some sentences that include that focus in there as well?
It doesn't need to be a formal assessment every time, but it can be assessing what you have taught, which is what a progress monitoring tool does as well.
Actually in our next professional learning topic, we're focusing on the progress monitoring tools for phonics. So that might be something interesting for people to check out as well.
Elaine Stanley:
Q: If you already have informative assessments for early reading to assess decoding accuracy and automaticity, and an assessment for phonological and phonemic awareness, do you think it's still worthwhile to administer the Year 1 Phonics Check?
Rebecca McEwan:
Let me just relay that back to you to make sure I've got the question right. This person has said they already assessed for letter–sound correspondences and for phonological and phonemic awareness. Is that right?
Elaine Stanley:
Yes. Decoding accuracy, automaticity and phonological and phonemic awareness. Is it still worthwhile to administer the Check?
Rebecca McEwan:
Perhaps this is somebody who is working within a program, so a phonics program that their school is implementing, and that will usually include that progress monitoring, and sometimes a review of everything that's been taught so far in that program or in that approach.
I would say that it is still useful to run your Year 1 Phonics Check for a couple of reasons.
This is an independent assessment that you can do that's not directly aligned with exactly what's being covered through the program or through the progression that you've been working through. It gives you that broader reaching data on what the students are able to do. It's a bit of a triangulation of data, if you like.
Also the Year 1 Phonics Check results, if you're doing them at the same time of year each year, on your Year 1 cohort, of course there can be cohort differences from year to year, but it actually gives you a really nice measure at a school level or an early years level about how your school is tracking in terms of their phonics instruction. Are we seeing more and more students that are falling into that ‘fluent decoders’ category across years, especially if your school is working on improving that phonics instruction approach.
Elaine Stanley:
That's always really useful information for strategic plans and annual implementation plans and informing those, so yes, very useful.