Tuesday Tip - Be Strict When Assessing Phonics

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss being careful with assessment in phoneme grapheme correspondence, stressing not to prematurely label students and to ensure they can quickly and confidently connect graphemes to phonemes during evaluations.

Video Transcript

Hello there. Welcome to another Tuesday Tip. My name is Jocelyn. When we're assessing our students, one of the things we need to really be careful of is to make sure that we don't say they have something until they actually have it. So when you're assessing students on their phoneme grapheme correspondence, and you point to a grapheme, what you're looking for the student to be able to provide for you is the phoneme that connects with that grapheme, like, if they spend some time looking at the ceiling, thinking about it, saying every other sound except the one that you want, they don't have it.

Similarly, when you are assessing the complex code and you show them, say, the 'EA' grapheme, and if they're thinking and they may be looking at a word and they take a while and then they say, E, it could be because they're actually analysing a word that they have committed to long term memory. This is not what we're looking for.

We want the students to know that phoneme graphing correspondence like that. Now, if the student was, um, had been learning alternate spellings and perhaps you were looking for them to say it like in bread and they said 'e' like in eat, then you can say, do you know another way? Or another phoneme that goes with that grapheme?

Now, if they say, oh yeah, it's 'eh', then they've got it. If, however, they stop and they look at the ceiling and they think and they look around and then they say, oh, 'eh', they don't have it. So it's about the speed, the automaticity, and the degree of confidence that the student has when they are completing that assessment.

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