Getting Started: Assessment Before Your Child's First Lesson

Pine State Learning | Assessment

Most families arrive at our door with a stack of paperwork. School evaluations, psychoeducational reports, IEP documents, progress notes from previous tutors. Sometimes that paperwork is detailed and useful. Sometimes it tells us very little about what the child actually needs next.

Before we begin instruction with any student, we do two things: compile and analyze all the data that came before, and conduct our own diagnostic evaluation. Our assessment is not about determining eligibility. We are building a map of your child's learning abilities.

This is what that process looks like, and why each piece of it matters.

A note before we begin: the assessment described below reflects what we do for a student presenting with reading difficulties. Students coming to us primarily with writing or math concerns follow a different, tailored process. If your child's primary need is in one of those areas, the categories of information look different as they relate to writing skills, not reading skills, but they still examine a mix of academic and underlying skills.

Symbol to Sound and Sound to Symbol

We start at the foundation. Reading and spelling both depend on a student's ability to connect the smallest units of written language, graphemes, with the smallest units of spoken language, phonemes. Graphemes are the written symbols: individual letters and letter combinations. Phonemes are the sounds they represent. The ability to move fluently between them draws on two distinct processing systems: orthographic processing, which handles the visual and memory side, and phonological processing, which handles the sound side.

We test both, and we test them in both directions.

First, we show a student a letter or letter combination and ask them to tell us the sound it makes. Then we do the reverse: we say a sound and ask them to write the letter or letters that represent it.

These two skills don't always develop in tandem. A student can recognize a grapheme correctly when reading but be unable to retrieve it from memory when spelling. That gap matters, because reading and spelling draw on related but distinct processes, and a student's individualized learning plan needs to account for both. Seeing where those processes diverge tells us a great deal about where instruction needs to focus.

Phonemic Awareness: The Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST)

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. This has nothing to do with letters or print. It's purely auditory.

We assess it because it's the skill underneath reading. Think of phonemic awareness as the blueprints and graphemes as the bricks. You can have all the bricks in the world, but without blueprints, there's no structure to build from. A student who can't reliably hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken language will struggle to apply phonics instruction no matter how well it's delivered, because the underlying architecture isn't there yet.

The Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST), a non-standardized assessment aligned to grade-level national standards, gives us a clear picture of where a student's phonemic awareness is solid and where it breaks down. It also tells us something important about automaticity: not just whether a student can do something, but whether they can do it quickly and without effort. Speed matters here, because slow phonemic processing affects reading fluency even when accuracy is intact.

Decoding: The Gallistel-Ellis Test of Coding Skills (GE)

We measure decoding with the Gallistel-Ellis Test of Coding Skills (GE), a non-standardized assessment aligned to grade-level national standards, which uses a mix of decodable real words and nonsense words. The nonsense words are particularly revealing: when a student reads a real word, there's no way to know whether they're actually decoding it, recognizing it from memory, or making an educated guess from context. Nonsense words strip all of that away. They can only be read by applying phonics knowledge directly. This gives us a clean measure of decoding skill at each level of complexity: which syllable types are solid, which vowel patterns are causing errors, and whether the difficulty is with accuracy, speed, or both.

Word Recognition: The Slosson Oral Reading Test – Revised 3 (SORT-R3)

Decoding and word recognition are related but distinct skills, and we assess them separately.

The Slosson Oral Reading Test – Revised 3 (SORT-R3), a non-standardized assessment aligned to grade-level national standards, measures word recognition: the bank of real words a student can read instantly, without needing to decode them. Fluent reading depends on both skills working together. A student who has to decode every word, even words they've encountered hundreds of times, will find reading slow and effortful. Comprehension suffers when too much mental energy is spent on getting through individual words.

Taken together, the GE and the SORT-R3 show us not just whether a student is struggling, but where: in the phonics-based decoding process, in building a reliable bank of recognized words, or in both.

Oral Reading Fluency

Once we know how a student decodes, we watch them read connected text.

We use the Scholastic 3-Minute Reading Assessment, a non-standardized tool aligned to grade-level national standards, which provides timed passages at multiple grade levels. We start below where we expect the student to be and work upward. We measure both accuracy and rate. A student can decode accurately but so slowly that comprehension falls apart by the time they reach the end of a sentence. A student can read quickly but make so many errors that meaning is lost. Fluency is the place where decoding and comprehension meet, and it's worth measuring on its own.

We also note the quality of errors. Does the student self-correct? Do they try to sound out unfamiliar words or skip them? Do the errors change the meaning of the sentence? These observations add texture to the numbers and help us understand how a student approaches reading when they're on their own.

Spelling: The Barnell-Loft Diagnostic Spelling Test

We assess spelling separately from reading, because they aren't the same skill.

Reading is a recognition task. Spelling is a retrieval and production task. A student who can read a word correctly may not be able to produce it from memory, and the reverse is also sometimes true. The Barnell-Loft Diagnostic Spelling Test, a non-standardized assessment aligned to grade-level national standards, allows us to identify exactly where a student's encoding breaks down, grade level by grade level and pattern by pattern.

Spelling results also confirm or complicate what we saw in decoding. If a student decodes multi-syllabic words accurately but spells them inconsistently, that's different from a student whose errors in both reading and spelling follow the same pattern. The contrast gives us useful information.

Writing Sample

The final piece of the initial assessment is a timed writing sample.

We give students five minutes to plan and organize their ideas, and then fifteen minutes to write. The planning time is structured and required: students don't begin writing until the full planning period is over. For older or more advanced students, we extend both windows.

This structure is deliberate. We want to see whether a student can plan before writing, not just start and see what comes out. And we want to see what their writing looks like when it has to be organized and sustained over time, not just in a single sentence.

The writing sample gives us a window into vocabulary, sentence structure, conventions, spelling in context, and the student's ability to organize and communicate a complete idea. It also sometimes reveals things the other assessments don't: a student who decodes adequately but whose writing shows extremely simple sentence structure, or a student whose spelling errors in isolation look mild but become more significant when they're trying to write and think at the same time.

What the Assessment Produces

After completing the evaluation, we write a report in plain language. Not a list of scores and percentiles, but a narrative that explains what we found, what it means for instruction, and what we recommend as a starting point.

That report becomes the foundation of the student's individualized learning plan. Every goal, every method, every decision about pacing and sequencing starts from what the assessment tells us.

The evaluation isn't a prerequisite to instruction. It's the reason the instruction works.

To learn more about how assessment findings shape instruction, read: Finding the Right Program or Curriculum for Your Learner.