Literacy Assessments: Science-of-Reading Constructs and Reading Diagnosis
The literacy assessment required of elementary, special education, and reading-endorsement candidates in Georgia tests whether you can explain how children learn to read, interpret screening and diagnostic data, and select instruction that matches a reader's profile. Items are scenario-heavy: you are given a student's scores or a transcribed reading behavior and asked what the data show and what to do next.
Models the test assumes
- Simple View of Reading: reading comprehension = decoding x language comprehension. A weakness in either factor caps comprehension; a strong decoder with weak language comprehension and a weak decoder with strong language comprehension need different interventions.
- Scarborough's Reading Rope: word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition) weave with language-comprehension strands (vocabulary, background knowledge, syntax, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge).
- Ehri's phases: pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, consolidated alphabetic. Instruction should target the phase the child is in.
- The five instructional components: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, delivered explicitly and systematically in a structured literacy approach.
Assessment types and the question each answers
- Screening: who is at risk? Brief, predictive universal measures such as letter-naming fluency, phoneme segmentation, nonsense-word fluency, oral reading fluency.
- Diagnostic: what exactly is wrong? Error analysis, phonics inventories, running records, spelling inventories.
- Progress monitoring: is the intervention working? Weekly or biweekly probes compared to an aim line.
- Outcome: the summative measure, such as Georgia Milestones, used for accountability rather than instruction.
Worked example
A second grader reads grade-level text at 98% accuracy but only 35 correct words per minute against a 90 wcpm benchmark, with 60% comprehension. Accuracy rules out a decoding problem, and the Simple View says comprehension is being starved by rate and prosody, not by word recognition. The target is fluency: teacher modeling, repeated reading, phrase-cued reading, with progress monitored weekly. Contrast this with a reader at 85% accuracy and weak comprehension; there the first move is phonics and decoding, because comprehension cannot exceed word recognition.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating phonological awareness (oral) and phonics (print) as synonyms.
- Calling fluency "reading fast" and ignoring accuracy and prosody.
- Using a screener as if it were a diagnosis.
- Prescribing comprehension strategy practice for a decoding deficit.
- Overlooking oral language and vocabulary for multilingual learners.