Skill Performance Assessment for Kindergarten Reading Screening Measures: Pilot Study

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.