Screening means assessing what a student knows. There are three primary skills I screen for before I begin working with a student: their visual literacy and phonics (reading from a page), their aural phonological awareness (manipulating spoken words), and their spelling proficiency. I use various screening tools to test these skills which are detailed below. By setting this baseline, I'm able to meet a student where they are and build up their skills from the bottom up. The screening process is generally done over 1-2 half hour sessions.
After lessons begin, screening is repeated periodically so that growth can be tracked and any weaknesses can be pinpointed. Depending on the lesson schedule and the frequency of the lessons, this would happen every 4-12 weeks.
This screening tool focuses on visual knowledge. It checks a student's knowledge of the alphabet (both letter names and sounds), their ability to blend words together, and compares their reading skills to the vocabulary they've memorized. The screener becomes more difficult with each stage until a student is unable to continue.
This screening tool checks aural phonological awareness, focusing on a few key skills: rhyming, blending and segmenting words, sound position identification (where a sound is located in a word), and syllable segmentation. The student is asked to do these tasks vocally rather than in written form.
The DIBELS is the screening program that's been adopted by the multiple school divisions across Manitoba for the purpose of universal screening. It checks a student's text level of reading and understanding rather than just word level. The test is specific to the student's grade level and has norms which makes it possible to compare the particular student's skills to that of an average student of their age and grade.
This is a simple spelling test that checks both the entire word as well as small portions of it for correct spelling. As well as testing the spelling itself, this helps identify gaps between reading and spelling ability when used in combination with the other screening tools.
While the above screening tools are sufficient for the vast majority of students, some benefit from additional specialized screening tools to check for specific concerns. As learning is always ongoing, these may happen after the initial screening period. These additional screening tools are similar to those above, but with a focus on a more narrow area (for example, checking only the manipulation of phonemes in words).