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a ready-to-run workshopAssessing Foundational Skills
Literacy · Workshop

Assessing Foundational Skills (Workshop)

Everything you need to lead this with your staff or PLC: a minute-by-minute run-of-show, what to say, what to hand out, and how to make it stick. Pick the length that fits your slot.

Key takeaway

A reading score that says a student is below grade level tells you there is a problem but nothing about its cause, whereas targeted foundational-skills assessment, of phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency, pinpoints exactly which skill has broken down, which is the difference between knowing a reader struggles and knowing what to teach them tomorrow.

Format
PLC / team meeting
Length
45 minutes
Group size
Any (works 4-40)
Who can run it
Any teacher-leader
You will need
Slides (5)Printed handoutYour foundational assessmentsA timer
Aligned to
Learning Forward: Rigorous ContentInTASC 6: AssessmentThe science of reading: diagnostic foundational assessment
Share / assign

Why it works

When a student cannot read at grade level, the most important question is not whether they are behind, which a broad screening score already tells you, but why, and that is a question only targeted foundational-skills assessment can answer. Reading is built on a set of foundational skills that develop in a rough sequence, phonemic awareness (hearing and manipulating the sounds in spoken words), phonics and decoding (mapping letters to sounds and blending them to read words), and fluency (reading words accurately and automatically enough that attention is free for meaning), all of which must be in place for comprehension to be possible. A reader can break down at any point in that chain, and a student who scores low on a comprehension measure might be struggling for completely different reasons: weak phonemic awareness that undermines decoding, a specific gap in phonics patterns, accurate but painfully slow and effortful decoding that leaves no capacity for meaning, or strong decoding but a vocabulary or knowledge gap that is not a foundational-skills problem at all. These require entirely different instruction, and a single global score cannot distinguish them, which is why teachers so often know a student is behind without knowing what to do about it. Assessing foundational skills with precision solves this by isolating each link in the chain. Phonemic awareness assessments check whether a student can hear, segment, and blend sounds. Phonics and decoding assessments, often including nonsense words to test decoding rather than memorized sight recognition, reveal exactly which letter-sound patterns and word types a student can and cannot decode. Fluency assessments, typically a timed oral reading measuring accuracy and rate, show whether decoding has become automatic or is still slow and effortful. Read together, these tell a precise story: this student has solid phonemic awareness and decodes single-syllable words but breaks down on multisyllabic words and vowel teams, and reads accurately but far too slowly, so the instructional priorities are these specific patterns and building fluency. That is instructionally actionable in a way a grade-equivalent score never is. Several principles make foundational assessment useful rather than just more testing: assess the specific skills rather than global level, use it diagnostically to locate the breakdown and not merely to rank, assess efficiently (many foundational measures take only a few minutes per student), and translate results directly into what to teach. The workshop helps teachers assess phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency precisely enough to locate where a reader is stuck, and turn that diagnosis into a specific instructional plan.

The research: Science of reading research on diagnostic assessment of phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency.

The run-of-show

Choose your slot. The agenda, timings, and length update to match.

    The core activity: locate the breakdown, then plan

    The heart of the session is assessing the foundational skills precisely enough to find exactly where a reader is stuck and turning that into what to teach.

    Find out why, not just how far behindA grade-equivalent score says a reader struggles; it cannot say which link in the foundational chain broke. Targeted assessment of phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency pinpoints the breakdown, which is what tells you what to teach tomorrow.

    Facilitator notes

    Different breakdowns need different instructionWeak phonemic awareness, a specific phonics gap, slow fluency, and a knowledge gap all look like low reading until you assess precisely. Each calls for different teaching, which is why locating the exact breakdown is the whole point.

    Adapt it

    Participant handout

    One page for every teacher. Print it, or save it as a PDF.

    K12 Academics · Professional Learning

    Assessing Foundational Skills: diagnose the breakdown

    Find exactly where a reader is stuck: assess phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, and fluency to locate the broken link and plan the specific instruction it calls for.

    1. The reader I want to understand:
    2. Phonemic awareness: what the assessment shows:
    3. Phonics and decoding (including nonsense words): what it shows:
    4. Fluency (accuracy and rate): what it shows:
    5. The specific instructional priority this diagnosis points to:

    Make it stick

    Precise diagnosis turns a struggling reader into a teachable plan. Close by setting the follow-up:

    Common questions

    Don't our screening and benchmark tests already tell me which students are behind?
    They tell you who is behind, which is valuable for identifying who needs help, but they usually do not tell you why, and the why is what determines the instruction. A benchmark or screening score is a broad measure of reading level, and two students with the same low score can be struggling for entirely different reasons: one has weak phonemic awareness undermining decoding, another decodes accurately but far too slowly, another decodes and reads fluently but has a vocabulary or knowledge gap. Those need completely different teaching, and the screening score cannot distinguish them. That is precisely the gap diagnostic foundational assessment fills: it goes beyond the global level to isolate each link in the chain, phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, fluency, so you can see which one has broken down. So the screening tells you to look closer at this student; the foundational assessment tells you what you will actually teach. They serve different purposes, and the instructional one is the foundational diagnosis.
    Why would I use nonsense words to assess decoding, isn't that artificial?
    It feels artificial, but that artificiality is exactly what makes it diagnostically powerful, because nonsense words isolate decoding from memory. When a student reads a real word, you cannot tell whether they decoded it by mapping letters to sounds or simply recognized it as a memorized whole, and many struggling readers compensate by memorizing a large bank of sight words, which masks a genuine decoding weakness. A nonsense word like vatch or blorp cannot have been memorized, so reading it requires actually applying letter-sound knowledge and blending, which means a nonsense-word measure reveals true decoding skill rather than sight recognition. This matters because a student who recognizes many words but cannot decode will hit a wall as texts introduce unfamiliar vocabulary, and you want to catch that underlying decoding gap rather than be reassured by their memorized words. So the nonsense words are not testing a useless skill; they are a clean window onto the decoding ability that real words can hide, which is why they are a staple of good foundational assessment.
    I teach older students, aren't foundational skills only relevant in the early grades?
    That assumption is one of the most common and costly mistakes in secondary literacy, because a significant number of older struggling readers have foundational gaps that no one assesses precisely because everyone assumes the problem must be comprehension. By middle and high school, instruction and assessment focus almost entirely on comprehension and content, and when an older student struggles, the default response targets comprehension strategies. But some of those students decode slowly and effortfully, or have specific phonics gaps, or never fully developed fluency, and for them comprehension instruction cannot work, because attention consumed by laborious decoding leaves nothing for meaning. The only way to know is to assess the foundational skills, which teachers rarely do with older students, so the real cause goes undetected for years. This does not mean every struggling adolescent has a decoding problem; many do have genuine comprehension, vocabulary, or knowledge gaps. It means you cannot assume, and a quick foundational assessment, which takes only minutes, is the way to find out whether an older reader's problem is foundational or not, which completely changes what you teach them.

    Go deeper

    Build it into a bigger day

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    Assessing Reading