I’m sitting down to internalize the report I got last week all about my daughter’s literacy skills. The goal is to take it one test at a time, determining the various skills each one measures and understanding where my daughter is starting from. This is called a baseline – it helps us measure a student’s academic growth. For students with learning differences or students whose education was massively impacted by the pandemic, the growth that is happening each academic year is the best information to pay attention to.

The Significance of Measuring Growth Over Averages

There’s a temptation to focus on how our kids are scoring according to the “average” student in their grade or age range, but those ranges are subjective, and they don’t tell us much about what’s happening year over year for our children. Here’s a much more effective use of your energy: first, recognize the growth your child is making, check on it at least four times a year, and then find out how their skill levels compare with their peers.

Embracing Diverse Intelligences and Learning Paces

I also believe in the diversity of intelligence and pace of learning. As long as my children are making measurable and meaningful progress and retaining that knowledge over time, I trust they will get to where they need to be in order to pursue what they want to pursue and make their specific beauty in the world. I know a lot of students who never performed in the “average” range on norm-referenced tests who are now thriving in their professional lives, achieving far more than anyone (or any assessment) expected. I also know plenty of students who have struggled significantly in spite of their “above average” scores on norm-referenced tests. A test only highlights the intelligence of some students. While these assessments have a vital role in helping educators support students on an individualized level, I believe that role is mostly about measuring growth and selecting areas to focus on, not dictating what scores students should be reaching at a given point. Humans are far too complex to be measured that way. Especially little humans.

Assessing Literacy with Norm-Referenced Tests: An Overview

My daughter was given two norm-referenced tests in her consultation with Briana. The first was the WIST, or Word Identification & Spelling Test. The second was the GORT-5. Let’s dive into the WIST today. We’ll talk about the GORT-5 another time.

Deep Dive into the Word Identification & Spelling Test (WIST)

The WIST was designed by Wilson Language, whom we are big fans of here at Redwood. It measures your child’s ability to read both real words and nonsense words in isolation, free from any context clues. Just one word at a time. The student begins by reading single-syllable words with the most common syllable patterns, slowly moving on to longer and more complex words as the test progresses. The person administering the assessment listens to your child read those words, marking which ones were read correctly and which were missed. For the words that were read incorrectly or skipped, the educator marks which specific sound or syllable the student missed.

This nitty-gritty analysis provides so much good information about which sounds they know, which syllable types they know, and which ones we should focus intervention around.

The Importance of Testing Both Real and Nonsense Words

Why do we test both real and nonsense words? Well, kids are smart and can memorize a lot of words, especially popular single-syllable words their brain has seen thousands of times by third grade. To ensure that we understand what they are truly able to decode rather than what they can memorize, we show them nonsense words. These are words they’ve never seen before, but they can sound them out using the decoding rules in the English language. For example, try reading these out loud: mish, gop, lud.

Decoding, Encoding, and Sound-Symbol Knowledge

The WIST also measures your child’s ability to spell words in isolation. Spelling, which is also called encoding, is basically the same set of skills required to decode or sound out a word, but in the opposite chronological order. Decoding and encoding are so tightly intertwined that we never recommend teaching one without the other. They reinforce each other. Spelling (encoding) is often a more challenging task than reading (decoding), especially for those students with reading challenges. To spell a word, you must isolate every sound in the word and then correctly match that sound to the letter or letter combinations used to represent the sound. This work of isolating sounds inside of words is especially challenging for the dyslexic brain. We dictate lists of real and nonsense words out loud. Your child repeats the words to ensure they have heard them correctly and then spells the words on paper. We then analyze their errors, noticing the patterns of sounds and syllable types your child knows well and those that they consistently miss.

Lastly, the WIST measures your child’s sound-symbol knowledge – their ability to match symbols they see to the sounds they hear. For example, we show them the symbol b and ask them to say the name of that symbol as well as the sound it represents. It can be surprising to see some kids' gaps in sound-symbol knowledge, even if they are able to read lots of words made up of those symbols. When this happens, it’s an indicator that they are relying heavily on memorization, which is very taxing on the brain and inconsistent once they get to middle school, high school, and beyond, where the number of unfamiliar words they see in texts skyrockets. Making sure all students have a solid sound-symbol foundation is crucial to setting them up to be fluent and confident readers and writers. This foundation will also preserve critical energy for comprehension and written expression, both of which are essential literacy skills.

Analyzing Test Results: Raw Scores, Grade-Level Equivalents, and Percentiles

Once we’ve collected all the data from the activities described above, we present them in raw scores as well as grade-level equivalents and age-based percentiles.

Let me break down those various data representations:

The raw scores are simply how many words or symbols your child reads correctly. So if in the Word Identification box, you see a raw score of 58, that means your child read 58 words correctly. We keep showing them words, marking their errors, until they get five in a row wrong. If you see a raw score of 32 in the spelling box, that means your child spelled 32 given words correctly. Always check the raw score for growth year over year. Even if a grade-level equivalency or age-based percentile doesn't increase as much as you’d like, raw scores can show a lot of impressive and meaningful growth. For example, my daughter’s baseline raw score for word identification was zero, meaning she was unable to read any of the words shown to her. For spelling, it was one. This is her starting point.

We then take the raw scores and use an algorithm to determine what grade-level equivalency those raw scores correlate to. This compares students’ raw scores to the national averages of other students in their grade level. This is reported as an approximate grade level. For my daughter, her raw scores put her below the first-grade level, which is the lowest this particular test will report.

Lastly, we use a different algorithm to compare students’ raw scores to the national averages of other kids their exact ages, including year and month. This is reported as a percentile. My daughter scored between the 3rd and 5th percentile, meaning her raw scores were below about 95% of other kids her age. While this number may be alarming at first, I understand that this is very early in her educational journey and that the long-term objective is her ability to comprehend text and express herself confidently, not to outscore other first and second graders in a percentile measure.

Why Literacy Is the Foundation of Learning

Why am I so certain about this? Well, if students can read and write proficiently, they are set up for success to learn pretty much anything they set their minds to. They are better set up to be successful in mathematics, sciences, languages, arts, music, history, geography, social sciences, financial literacy, communication, and vocational careers. Literacy is the doorway to the endless possibilities of growing your knowledge and skills. You don’t have to be the best reader to access that doorway. There is room enough for everybody to walk through and find their own path. I believe that with my whole heart, and have witnessed its truth in the lives of thousands of students. I am confident that with the proper instruction, my daughter will build her skills and thrive.

Planning for Future Literacy Progress

Over the next year of instruction, I will quiz my daughter on reading and spelling at least once a week. Halfway through the year, I will ask Briana to readminister the GORT-5 to see if my daughter is progressing in the right direction and to get new data on what her continued trouble spots are. In a year, when I ask Briana to readminister the WIST, I have absolute confidence that if my daughter works through a structured literacy program like the Wilson Reading System® or SPELL-Links® at least twice a week for 60 minutes, her raw scores in reading, spelling, and sound-symbol recognition will jump significantly. I have absolutely no doubt. I also know she will be closer to walking through that doorway. She may not be all the way through it in a year – in fact, she probably won’t be. But she will be much closer. And the growth will be measurable. This is the power of understanding the starting point.

Additional Resources

Want your child to be assessed using the WIST? Click here to learn more.

Looking for an assessment to support tutoring instruction? Sign up for a placement consultation to learn more about your child’s literacy levels and what Redwood intervention would be best for them.

If you resonate with this article, google “dyslexia tutoring near me” to find support. Connecting with a knowledgeable professional can be transformative in empowering you with what you need to support your child with dyslexia. Also, reach out to other parents. You can google “dyslexia parent groups near me,” ask around at your child’s school, or attend a local event with dyslexia as its theme. Redwood Literacy and Redwood Schools are also here to help if we can. Please reach out. We’d love to hear from you.