Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS) Assessments are an important part of the literacy learning process. According to Tompkins, “Classroom assessment drives instructions, ensures that students are making adequate progress, determines the effectiveness of instruction, and assesses students' achievements” (2014). There are many literacy assessments available for use in schools. Each school district sifts through the different assessments and picks the assessment that is right for their students. These assessments evaluate different areas of literacy. There are six areas of evaluation for literacy are oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. While researching the different assessments I found a large number of schools that use the Phonological Awareness Literacy
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These areas are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and comprehension. It does not evaluate oral language and vocabulary (READ, 2013). Teachers being able to identify at risk students early in the year will help them to redesign their literacy instruction to help students to succeed, which will in effect cause children to enjoy reading and writing. Even though it does not evaluate all six diagnostic areas of literacy it can give the teacher an idea of where each student is in their learning process. Each grade has specific tasks that they are evaluated on, which will give an early indication of student at risk. The program is only set up to test pre-k, kindergarten and first through third grade (Wittery, 2013). Although these are usually the grade where most of the literacy learning develops the intermediate grades is where literacy learning is refined, but PALS does not have assessment available for these grades. Lastly, PALS assessment is very reliable from year to year and teachers can be confident in their findings after using the PALS assessment (Wittery,
These areas are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and comprehension. It does not evaluate oral language and vocabulary (READ, 2013). Teachers being able to identify at risk students early in the year will help them to redesign their literacy instruction to help students to succeed, which will in effect cause children to enjoy reading and writing. Even though it does not evaluate all six diagnostic areas of literacy it can give the teacher an idea of where each student is in their learning process. Each grade has specific tasks that they are evaluated on, which will give an early indication of student at risk. The program is only set up to test pre-k, kindergarten and first through third grade (Wittery, 2013). Although these are usually the grade where most of the literacy learning develops the intermediate grades is where literacy learning is refined, but PALS does not have assessment available for these grades. Lastly, PALS assessment is very reliable from year to year and teachers can be confident in their findings after using the PALS assessment (Wittery,