Virginia Assessment: PALS

                                                                                                                (PALS Virginia, 2003)

I teach kindergarten in Virginia. Here, we are required to administers PALS (phonological awareness literacy screening) 3 times a year to students K-2. I think it's a great data point to see where students are and from that, use the data to teach what students need. 

I'm currently taking courses through American College of Education and I am almost done with my Master's degree!!!! For my last class, I am taking a course about standards driven assessments. From the title alone, I was very excited to take this class and I'm glad I'm ending on this one. I am very interested in aligning standards to create assessments then using and analyzing that data to drive teaching and learning. PALS was recently administered to all of our students, K-2 and now we can use that data to drive our teaching. 

While typing my most recent paper, I recently found an interesting article about the purpose of PALS and the research and importance behind it (Invernizzi, Marcia et al., 2004-2015). I couldn't believe I didn't read it before! This article is great not only for kindergarten teachers in Virginia, but kindergarten teachers all over! This article is specific to kindergarten but can help understand what some older students are missing or what younger learners need next.

Purpose of PALS:

• identify students who perform below grade level
• assess what students already know about English and reading
• reliable screening for developmental milestones in literacy acquisition
• identify students who may be in need of additional reading instruction beyond what is typically provided to developing readers (Invernizzi, Marcia et al., 2004-2015)

What PALS assesses:

• Rhyme and beginning sound awareness
• Alphabet knowledge
• Letter-sound awareness
• Letter sounds
• Spelling
• Concept of word
• Word recognition in isolation (Invernizzi, Marcia et al., 2004-2015)

Research & Importance:

• rhyme and individual phoneme awareness are two skills significantly related to reading outcomes
• pictures used for rhyme and beginning sound were picked carefully
• alphabet recognition on it's own is the single best predictor of early reading achievement
• New readers must develop knowledge of letter sounds and learn to apply that knowledge
•  Application of letter-sound knowledge in invented spelling tasks is an excellent predictor of word recognition in young children and among the best predictors of word analysis and word synthesis 
•  a stable concept of word in text can facilitate a child’s awareness of the individual sounds within words
• Until children can point to individual words accurately within a line of text, they will be unable to learn new words while reading or to attend effectively to letter-sound cues at the beginning of words in running text
• PALS-K has been shown to be steady, reliable, and consistent among many different groups of users (Invernizzi, Marcia et al., 2004-2015)

All of that said... what do I do with that?

Below is data from the kindergarten PALS assessment. I've cropped out the names to protect their privacy. 

Across the top, you can see the different parts that are assessed. Not all students will do the individual rhyme/beginning sound (that depends on their group score). Not all students will do the preprimer, primer and first grade word list (that depends on if they are deemed a "reader" or not by the assessor). One student did not take the assessment yet. The top row of numbers is the maximum score students could get and the bottom row is the benchmark for where students should or could be at this point.

I can use this data to drive my instruction by looking at the red bubbles. If the red bubbles go across more often than not, that tells me that that student is not meeting grade level expectations overall and needs extra support. You can see there are a few students who have several red bubbles going across (those with red bubbles all the way to the right are considered IDed and will receive extra support from the reading specialists). There are also a few students who have some red bubbles, but not many. I can note this and call on them and work with them for those certain tasks.

If I look at the columns, that will tell me what I need to work on teaching as a bigger picture or whole group. If there are more red bubbles in a column, that is reflective of my teaching instead of for each student. Based on these scores, I can tell that my students need more help with pointing to the text.

I know that at the beginning of the year, students will normally have lower scores. The benchmarks do go up at the midyear assessment and the end of the year assessment as students should be progressing. I will use this data to plan my weekly lessons to try to get their scores up to help my students become readers.

Invernizzi, M., Juel, C., Swank, L., Meier, J.. pals. K Technical Reference.             https://pals.virginia.edu/public/pdfs/rd/tech/K_Tech_Ref_2015.pdf

PALS Virginia. (2003). https://pals.virginia.edu/