Universal Screener: Early Literacy Indicators

Early literacy skills develop in a predictable progression, with each skill building on the ones that come before it. Research from the Science of Reading shows that students must first develop strong foundational skills—such as phonological awareness, phonics, and word recognition—before they can read fluently and comprehend text.

Risk status for specific Literacy Indicators is reported when students complete a Kindergarten - 3rd Grade Reading Screener by Classworks.

This information is reported on the Student Screener Summary Report.

Literacy Indicators

The early literacy indicators measured in K–3 screeners are intentionally aligned to a skill progression, providing insight into students’ foundational reading skills and helping educators identify strengths, gaps, and next instructional steps early.

Phonological Memory

The ability to hold on to speech-based information in short-term memory is called phonological memory. It is distinct from phonological awareness, which only refers to the ability to identify sounds. We rely heavily on our phonological memory when reading and spelling.

Phonemic Segmentation

The ability to break words down into individual sounds. For example, a child may break the word “sand” into its component sounds – /sss/, /aaa/, /nnn/, and /d/.

Phoneme Manipulation Tasks

Phoneme manipulation is the act of rearranging or changing individual sounds (phonemes) in a word to create new words. This can be done by adding, deleting, or substituting phonemes. For example, a child may change the /s/ in “sat” to /b/ to get “bat”.

Alphabetic Knowledge

The ability to identify letters by name, shape, and sound. Letter naming is recognizing letter shapes and associating them with a letter name. Letter-sound knowledge determines what sounds are associated with a letter.

Blending

Decoding is recognizing that each letter makes a specific sound, and blending is putting those sounds together to read the word.

Onset & Rime

One process to decode words. The onset is the part of a single-syllable word before the vowel. The rime is the part of a word including the vowel and the letters that follow.

Word Identification

The ability to accurately and automatically identify sight words and apply decoding strategies to read unfamiliar words.

Word Recognition Fluency

The cluster of strategies that are used to recognize words in reading includes the instant recognition of sight words, the interpretation of context clues, and the use of phonics and structural analysis (morphology).

Oral Vocabulary

An important focus of literacy refers to the knowledge of words, including their structure (morphology), use (grammar), meanings (semantics), and links to other words (word/semantic relationships).

Semantics

Semantics refers to understanding the meaning of sentences and the relationship of words within a sentence.

Basic Text Comprehension

The ability to read text, process it, and understand its meaning. It relies on two interconnected abilities: word reading (being able to decode the symbols on the page) and language comprehension (being able to understand the meaning of the words and sentences).