For instruction to effectively address your child’s learning goals/needs, initial assessments will be administered during your child’s first tutoring session. In addition to parent/guardian input, your child’s initial assessment results will inform next instructional steps. Your child will be assessed using research validated tools across key literacy domains.

For younger children, these assessments include tests of phonological knowledge (including phonemic awareness), alphabet knowledge (letters & sounds), phonics knowledge (phoneme-grapheme correspondences), fluency (oral reading accuracy, rate, prosody, and comprehension), oral language and reading comprehension, and written language.

For older, more advanced children, their phonics knowledge, fluency, oral/silent reading comprehension, narrative/expository comprehension, metacognitive awareness (strategy knowledge), and written language will be assessed using tools that appropriately measure development at their ages/grade levels.

A combination of screening tools and diagnostic measures may be utilized to gather information about your child’s current literacy development. Multiple data sources are analyzed to capture a portrait or snapshot of your child’s current literacy abilities.

During tutoring sessions, your child’s ongoing progress will be monitored. Formative assessments that focus on identifying learning gaps while instruction is occurring will regularly provide you and your child with important feedback about our work together.

For those of you who wish to better understand your child’s current literacy development and are not pursuing tutoring at this time, I also offer a robust battery of research-validated assessments that can be administered in two 1-hour testing sessions. This battery involves many of the same initial screening assessments used to plan for instruction during tutoring sessions as well as more diagnostic measures.

After testing, you will be provided with a Diagnostic Literacy Learner Profile. This includes a description of the testing undertaken and salient observations during testing. This document details your child’s assessment results in narrative form and identifies your child’s literacy strengths and areas of instructional need across the literacy domains.