Background: Recently, Literably has added a set of phonological awareness (PA) and phonics assessments to its library. These short exercises are designed to assess younger students’ ability to work with sounds and decode words (both real and nonsense). You may begin to notice that a small percentage of the recordings you receive are these foundational skills assessments, and we want to share the directions below for scoring these types of recordings.
A foundational skills recording will have the following characteristics:
1) It is typically short, lasting a few seconds or less.
2) The title of the text will be a prompt, such as:
• Say fun. Take away /f/ and say what’s left.
• Read this word out loud: tof
• The text will show the correct answer, such as “un” in the screenshot below.
The screenshot below shows an example of a FS prompt:
Scoring Guidelines:
To score FS recordings, you would follow the same guidelines as in the general directions. It is especially important, however, that you transcribe students’ utterances accurately according to the phoneme chart. We recommend bookmarking this chart or printing it out for reference, and re-watching this video to re-familiarize yourself with the phonemes.
Below are some rules that are very important to keep in mind for these types of recordings:
• Insert a hyphen at the end of any non-word utterance (which should always be transcribed phonetically). For example, "klag-." In contrast, utterances that sound like real words should be inserted as the actual word, without the addition of the hyphen.
• Insert a hyphen after any utterance that contain just a single phoneme (i.e., any of the phonemes on this chart). As an example, if the student says /o/ as in "hot," you would insert "o-." Some other examples might be: "oe-," "au-," "ch-," etc.
• If the reader says all of the right sounds in the right order without pausing in between sounds, mark it as correct, even if the word sounds "stretched out." However, if the student takes an audible pause in between the sounds, mark it as incorrect, even if all the sounds are in the right order.
• If the reader inserts the NAME of a letter, please transcribe the letter in upper case. For example, if the student inserts "vee-," please enter "V." Similarly, if the student inserts "aech-," please insert "H." As another example:
For the example prompt above (Say fun. Take away /f/ and say what's left.):
If the student said this (audio below), you would submit the recording with no markings (in other words, as read accurately):
If the student said nothing (i.e., the recording is blank), you would cross out the text and submit (you would not mark it unscorable):
If the student said “fun,” you would cross out the text, insert “fun,” and submit:
If the student said something unrelated to the prompt, cross out the text, insert their utterance, and submit:
Foundational Skills FAQs:
- When should I mark a FS recording unscorable? - There should be very few instances when you would mark a PA/phonics recording unscorable. If the student is barely audible (so you cannot hear them accurately), if there is excessive background noise, or if the audio is scrambled or distorted, you can mark it unscorable.
- What should I do if a student inserts a "schwa" after a consonant phoneme? For example, if they add the /u/ sound after /f/? - Transcribe the utterance exactly how you hear it. For example, if a student says "fu-" instead of how the /f/ phoneme should sound here, mark the /f/ as incorrect and insert "fu-."