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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

kindergarten students, screening instruments, literacy skills, disability

College

David O. McKay School of Education

Department

Communication Disorders

Abstract

Kindergarten students are often administered screening instruments designed to identify weaknesses in emergent literacy skills. Unfortunately, these screeners, which only measure what a student currently knows, cannot validly differentiate between students who have low scores because of limited exposure, language/dialectal differences, or a disability. A more valid approach to identifying kindergarten students for future reading difficulty is needed. Dynamic assessment is emerging as a valid alternative to traditional screening measures. The language subtest of the PEARL (Petersen & Spencer, 2016) uses a dynamic assessment approach where students are administered a pretest (a story retell), participate in language instruction on story retelling, and then are administered a posttest (another story retell). This dynamic assessment approach measures how well a student can learn language, as opposed to their current language ability. The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive validity of the PEARL. Our research questions were: 1) To what extent are the scores from progress monitoring assessments lower for kindergarten students at risk/not at risk? 2) What is the sensitivity and specificity of the PEARL?

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