Two examples of other informal reading assessments are the Phonics Mastery Survey and Phonemic Awareness Assessments. The Phonics Mastery Survey is an informal tool for assessing various phonics elements. This assessment measures a student’s ability to recognize consonant sounds, rhyming words, consonant digraphs, long vowel sounds, words with CVC patterns, consonant blends, variant vowel sounds, and syllables in words (DeVries 2011 p.112). A student’s ability to use knowledge of sound/letter correspondences to decode words, determines his or her ability to read individual words. Knowing the skills that the students possess will assist the teacher in selecting reading tasks that offer the most effective reinforcement of those phonics skills.
