Skill Performance Assessment for Kindergarten Reading Screening Measures: Pilot Study

Abstract

Kindergarten reading screening measures typically identify many students as at risk who later meet criteria on important outcome measures (i.e., false positives). To address this issue, we evaluated a gated screening process that included accelerated progress monitoring, followed by a simple goal/reward procedure (skill vs. performance assessment, SPA) to distinguish between skill and performance difficulties on Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) and Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) in a multiple baseline across students design. Nine kindergarten students scored below benchmark on PSF and/or NWF at the middle of year benchmark assessment. Across students and skills ( n = 13 panels of the study), nine met/exceeded benchmark during baseline (suggesting additional exposure to the assessments was adequate), two exceeded benchmark during goal/reward procedures (suggesting adding a motivation component was adequate), and two required extended exposure to goal/reward or skill-based review to exceed the benchmark. Across panels of the baseline, 12 of 13 skills were at/above the end-of-year benchmark on PSF and/or NWF, suggesting lower risk than predicted by middle-of-year screening. Due to increasing baseline responding, experimental control was limited; however, these results suggest that simple progress monitoring may help reduce false positives after screening. Future research on this hypothesis is needed.