Early Literacy Screening in Kindergarten: Widespread Implementation in Virginia

Journal of Literacy Research, Winter 2004/2005 by Invernizzi, Marcia, Justice, Laura, Landrum, Timothy J, Booker, Keonya

With these goals in mind, and in specific response to a statewide public policy initiative in Virginia, the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS-K) (Invernizzi, Swank, Juel, & Meier, 2003) was developed. In 1997, the Virginia General Assembly established the Early Intervention Reading Initiative (EIRI), which was designed to provide assistance to school divisions striving to meet the state standards in literacy for kindergartners. In other words, the EIRI was developed for the express purpose of reducing the number of children with reading problems through early screening and diagnosis and through acceleration of their acquisition of research-identified early reading skills by the end of first grade. To accomplish this purpose, the PALS-K instrument was developed and provided as the statewide screening tool for the EIRI. PALS-K is a brief, easily administered screening device that provides a broad-based evaluation of children's skills across the key dimensions of early literacy. The goals of PALS-K are threefold: (a) to identify children requiring early literacy intervention, (b) to guide teachers' development of classroom-based early literacy enhancement strategies, and (c) to document the effectiveness of early literacy instruction for children identified as needing intervention.

The EIRI has now been in place in Virginia for seven years, making the PALS-K instruments among the most widely used in the nation. With little formal training, thousands of kindergarten teachers across the Commonwealth have used PALS-K to identify children needing early literacy enhancement prior to entering first grade. According to participating school district reports, these teachers further use the results of the PALS-K assessment to plan and evaluate their reading instruction. In this paper we provide an overview of the background of PALS-K, followed by a description of the PALS-K assessment package, and the quantitative and qualitative results from the first seven years of widespread implementation, in which more than 430,000 kindergarteners were screened for early literacy.

Virginia Early Intervention Reading Initiative and PALS-K

PALS-K was conceived as a direct result of a public policy initiative by the Virginia General Assembly designed to reduce reading difficulties among young children and to increase the likelihood of grade-level reading by the end of first grade. To preface, Virginia has in place a set of specific and rigorous standards regarding expected learning outcomes of children across the primary and secondary grades, known as the Standards of Learning (SOL). The SOL for English in kindergarten, which include a set of specified outcomes designed so that "students will become independent readers by the end of first grade" (Virginia Department of Education [VDOE], 1995, p. 61), were particularly important with regard to the development and use of PALS-K. Examples of Virginia's SOL for kindergarten are presented in Table 1. Children must, among other things, be able to recognize rhyming words, identify upper- and lower-case letters of the alphabet, and follow (e.g., track) words from left to right and top to bottom on a printed page (VDOE, 1995).