Kilpatrick Ch 7: Assessing Phonics Skills

All of the following are true about phonic knowledge except:

• Typically progressing readers develop phonic knowledge even if not directly taught.

• Phonic knowledge is not essential for skilled readers, even if it is helpful for weak readers.

• Phonic knowledge is best assessed with nonsense word reading tests.

• Sove basic phonic knowledge is a necessary prerequisite for reading in an alphabet-based orthography.

All of the following are true about orthographic knowledge/skills except:

• Orthographic skills strongly correlate with word-level reading skills.

• The most recent research suggests orthographic knowledge/skills to be an independent reading subskill largely unrelated to phonics and phonemic awareness.

• Common ways to assess orthographic knowledge are with homonym-based tasks and wordlikeness tasks.

• There is now a test of orthographic knowledge/skills on the market.

All of the following are features of orthographic knowledge except:

• Knowledge and awareness of common patterns in written English (e.g., -alk, -ight).

• Good spelling skills.

• Having a good understanding of the meanings in words with familiar spelling patterns.

• An awareness of which spelling patterns are permissible and which are not (e.g., bbrin is not acceptable but brinn is)

All of the following are true about using nonsense word subtests except:

• They provide a direct assessment of which type of phonics instruction a child has received (i.e., synthetic, analytic, embedded).

• They help assess letter-sound knowledge.

• They help assess phonic decoding skills.

• They help predict likely progress in real-word reading.

Timed and untimed nonsense word reading tests pretty much assess the same thing, so both do not need to be given

• True

• False

Though it is highly recommended, what is the one caveat when using the TOWRE-2 Phonetic Decoding Efficiency subtest?

• The test is too short to get any reliable information.

• The test has too many unusual words.

• Many children read nonsense words so fast, evaluators should consider audio recording student responses to check later.

• All of the above.

What does a nonsense word spelling subtest (e.g., WJ-IV Spelling of Sounds) evaluate?

• Phoneme segmentation and letter-sound knowledge.

• Phoneme blending and letter-sound knowledge

• Phoneme segmentation and phoneme blending

• Phoneme manipulation and letter-sound knowledge.

What level of performance on nonsense word reading tests would indicate there is no concern with phonic decoding so no additional help in that area would be recommended?

• Any score above the 16th percentile.

• Any score above the 20th percentile.

• Any score above the 25th percentile.

• Any score above the 34th percentile.

If children get stuck in their development of phonic skills

• They are not likely to make much progress until any underlying phono- logical awareness deficits are addressed.

• They should be encouraged to shift to a whole-word approach.

• They should continue with the same regimen of phonics instructions until they finally get it.

• They should be encouraged to rely on contextual guessing.

Commercially available tests that involve timed nonsense word reading include

• WJ-III ACH and PIAT-R

• WIAT-III and WRAT-4.

• TOWRE-2 and KTEA-3.

• All of the above have timed nonsense word reading subtests.