Universal Screener
What is a Universal Screener and Why is it Used?
A Universal Screener assesses primary students' proficiency around the areas of sound-symbol correspondence, including letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, including rhyming, blending, segmenting and oral language, including vocabulary, word matching, oral sentence comprehension and following directions. Universal screeners are norm-referenced, which means that they compare a national sample of same-age peers to create benchmarks. Using this data, they provide scores of current areas of strength and weakness, as well as a predictive profile for students who may exhibit indicators of dyslexia.
What Universal Screener is utilized in Montgomery?
Orchard Hill students in Kindergarten and Grade 1 currently take the Early Bird Screener, which serves as a Universal Screener for early literacy skills. The Early Bird Screener is designed to be game-like and engaging for students, while gathering comprehensive information about students' current levels of development in the areas of sound-symbol correspondence, phonological awareness and oral language. Please click here to read more about the Early Bird Screener, and please see the Intervention section of this website for more information regarding supports for students with dyslexia risk factors.
PAR
The Predictive Assessment of Reading (PAR) is utilized to screen academic support students in Grades 2 though 4. PAR assesses students' letter word identification, phonemic awareness, vocabulary and rapid automatic naming. Academic support teachers utilize this data to tailor literacy interventions to meet the needs of our students in both decoding (reading) and encoding (writing). Classroom teachers also utilize this data for Tier 1 classroom-based strategies and interventions.