Video Gallery

Literacy Links Pals

Go to Video Gallery Added Oct 18, 2022 •

Copy this URL:
Embed code:	<iframe class="edlio-embed-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="360" src="//ces.scsb.org/apps/embed/?v=345845" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Change dimensions

Go HD

Mrs. Frye and Mrs. McClure discuss the PALS assessment and help parents to understand what their child's score means and how it is used to support learning.

Show Transcript

hi welcome to Literacy Links I'm Diane Frye and I'm Amanda McClure We're part of your literacy team here at Chilhowie Elementary School. Literacy is one of the most crucial skills your child will need to develop for future success. One way to follow your child's progress is to monitor their literacy development and growth. We use a screener called the PALS screener that is sponsored by the Virginia Department of Education. This screener gives us a basic snapshot of critical literacy skills your child should be developing or have developed at this time. The screener is given three times a year in the fall and we give it again in the spring at the end of the school year but we also give it mid-year to monitor student growth in progress. We're going to talk to you today about understanding those scores and what it means for your child. PALS is given, as I said in grades pre-k through 3rd grade. So we're gonna talk first about what pal looks like in kindergarten. PALS stands for phonological awareness literacy screening. The PALS assessment in kindergarten is a measure of students' knowledge of several important literacy fundamentals such as phonological awareness, alphabet recognition, concept of word, knowledge of letter sounds, and spelling. PALS provides a direct means of matching our instruction to the specific literacy needs of your child It provides a way to identify our students who are relatively behind in their acquisition of these fundamental literacy skills. You should have received a letter such as the one on your screen. This letter explains exactly what PALS is, and it will tell you whether or not your child met the Benchmark and what exactly their SUM score was. We're now going to break apart each subtest. First, let's take a look at this pretend kindergarten student's scores. So the first component is the group rhyme task. For rhyme awareness, your child is given a set of 3 pictures. They are asked to identify the one that rhymes with the target picture. As you can see, the number in parentheses on the right is 5. That is what is considered the benchmark. The student scored a three, so they did not meet the Benchmark for the group rhyme task. If that happens, they are then asked to give - we're asked to give - an individual rhyme task. Once again you can see the Benchmark is a 5 and their score was at 3. The individual rhyme is done exactly as it sounds like it is: one-on-one with the teacher. Students are again given pictures and asked to identify the one that rhymes with the target picture. The next subtest is the group beginning sound. Our Benchmark is a 5 as you can see in the parenthesis and then this child's score was a 7 so they scored above the Benchmark. However, you can see that the maximum score that they could have obtained was a 10, so they still don't quite have full Mastery of beginning sounds, but have met the Benchmark required by PALS. The group Beginning Sound task is basically the same thing as the rhyme - they are given a set of 3 pictures and then students are asked to identify the one that has the same beginning sound as the target picture. We'll continue on to alphabet recognition. You can see that the Benchmark they are required to recognize at least 12 lowercase alphabet letters. This child was only able to recognize 11 so they did not meet the required Benchmark for PALS. The maximum score would have been a 26. Letter sounds is very similar. The students are asked to produce the letter sounds of twenty-three uppercase letters of the alphabet as well as three digraphs. This particular student got a score of 4 and the Benchmark was a 5, so they did not meet the Benchmark for letter sounds. They are then given a spelling component. The students are asked to spell five consonant vowel consonant words and they receive credit for each phonetically acceptable substitution for those letters. As you can see this student was not able to come up with any correct responses. The Benchmark for spelling for fall is 2. The way that the SUM score is determined is they take the components (everything that is highlighted in green) and they add those together and they will take - if they have to do a group rhyme and an individual rhyme - they take the highest score from the individual. So they received a score of 3 so adding 7, 3, 11, and 4 gave this student a SUM score of 25. 29 was the benchmark. 92 was the maximum that they could have scored, so this student did not meet the PALS Benchmark for fall. So this in turn, they would receive an additional two and a half hours of instruction targeting the skills that they still need to work on. Alright, let's take a look at another kindergarten student. So this student - once again as you can see - their group rhyme score they received an 8. Benchmark was 5. 10 was the maximum that they could have scored correctly so they met the Benchmark in group rhyme. Same with group beginning sound, they received a score of 9, and 5 was the Benchmark, 10 being the maximum, so they were very close to scoring the maximum correct in the fall. For lowercase alphabet recognition, they knew 22 letters. 12 was the benchmark and for letter sounds, they knew 20 letter sounds. Only 5 was the required Benchmark for this task. Their spelling of consonant vowel consonant words,  they receive 17 points. 17 correct letters representing the sounds in those words. 2 was the required benchmark and once again once those scores are all totaled together, it gives us the SUM score of 76 out of 29. So this student would definitely be considered to be on track and not in need of any additional literacy support, other than what they are currently receiving in their classroom. All right we'll turn it over to Mrs. McClure who will explain what PALS looks like for first grade through third grade. I am Amanda McClure from Chilhowie Elementary and I'm so happy to have you on with me today. Today I've been given the opportunity to speak with you guys about the PALS screener that was given. Now, this is this screener, as Mrs. Frye said earlier, that just lets us see what your students know and what we need to work on. Okay, so the first letter that you see on the background is just the general letter that went home that explains the PALS and then it also had their SUM score with it. This letter is particularly for third grade so but if your child is in the first grade or second grade it would have geared to those. What I'm going to do is I want to go through first-grade, second-grade and third-grade samples for you and explain how it goes but in all three of these are all pretty much done the same way. We always start off with the spelling portion and then on a spelling test they don't grade it like you normally grade it. What they're grading it by is looking for different features out of that word and if they spell it correctly get an extra bonus point but so it's looking for spelling features not necessarily the spelling of the word or spelling the word correctly. The second thing we go into is the words in isolation or we call that the sight word list.  And that area that's where you will have the student in front of the screen with the teacher and usually a computer screen and you have the words - they're not small they're big - they have to read the words on the screen. They have the word sectioned off into either a pre-primer list, primer list, first-grade list, second-grade list, third-grade list, fourth-grade list fifth-grade list, sixth-grade list, seventh-grade list, and I believe it goes up to eighth-grade.  After that they go to a reading section and that's where they get to read the passage aloud to the teacher and the teacher gets to do like a little reading record to see how well they read the story and then they'll be asking comprehension questions with it. Now in first grade we do it a little bit different. There's another part of the assessment added to it and it is called the letter sounds and that is just as it sounds. They see a letter and they have to tell you what sound that letter makes. So it is a really informational great snapshot tool that we use here at the school. Now if some students don't meet the Benchmark that's where your title services come in and your PALS intervention services come in and they will get two and a half hours extra each week of instruction in the area that they were showing that they needed some extra attention. So let's go ahead and get started with first grade. So right here on this first one we have as an example you can see it is a first grade student and total spelling score they received an 11. The benchmark for the beginning of fall is a 10, so they - woohoo - they met Benchmark! They got one above. As you can see off to the side here that you're spelling feature they go up to 44 so this is great they've met Benchmark, we still know that there's some work that needs to take place. Next we go into those sight word lists and as you can see the pre-primer list is given. On that, that's where they got 7 out of the 20 words correct and that Benchmark of course is 10 so this is a place where that he, he or she, didn't meet Benchmark and so this is the place where they would work with your child. Then we have the next part which is letter sounds and again as I said that's just where they look at the letter they tell you the sound the letter makes. This received 17 and Benchmark was 21 so there are some letter sounds that they're not quite sure on yet still there then that is where we would have some instruction done because then if you look at this SUM score is a 35. If you go down, you see where it says instructional oral reading level that has right there an "R". That means they were given a reading of reading and passage called reading the reading passage they will have to read 93 they will be given an instruction or reading passage which is the our which is the reading that passage and on that passage this student Read 93%. They were really able to read that passage. They did a great job with it, they might have missed one or two words. What does that mean - Readiness? That just means that they were probably given books that you would see more in kindergarten - beginning of kindergarten - for them to read. And thats where we would get up and work with them and get them to progress a little bit further than that. Now when we go to the next one you can see the spelling score on this one spelling for this one was 20 of course Benchmark was a 10, so they got 10 more features onto this one past Benchmark, which is great. They received the pre-primer word list and in this section, they got 20 of the words and there were 20 on the pre-primer word list.  They were able to go on, because they met Benchmark,  to the primer word list. When they looked through the primer word list they received a four. That means they got 4 for it. The next part was the letter sounds and in this part we have they have 25 of the 21 letter sounds.  Thank you for watching our video. This is the first of many more to come. Throughout the year we will have different videos about literacy. If you have any questions or would like to see a video on a certain subject, just let us know. Thank you!

Video Gallery

Literacy Links Pals

Popular Videos