How to Assign a Foundational Skills Assessment

If your district or school has Foundational Skills (Phonics or Phonological Awareness) as part of your Literably subscription, you can use the directions below to assign these assessments to your students.

1. Review the current "Next Assessment" assignment.

Under the "Next Assessment" column of your teacher dashboard, you will see the assessment that is currently assigned to each student. This is the assessment that student will receive the next time they log into Literably to take an assessment.

Under "Assigned By," you will either see the initials of the teacher who manually assigned the assessment, or Rudy the Dog if the assessment has been recommended automatically by Literably. Hovering over the initials will show the teacher's full name:

2. Change the next assessment using the pencil icon, or preview the text using the eye icon:

3. Select a Foundational Skills assessment. 

In the pop-up window, use the drop-down menu under "Category" to select Phonics or Phonological Awareness:

Under Assessment Content, you can select the assessment that has been recommended by Literably, a pre-made assessment, or create your own custom assessment:

• Recommended by Literably (default): If your student has taken a previous assessment, Literably will adjust the difficulty level of the questions based on their performance on the previous assessment and suggest a new assessment. (Hint: you can use the "See Preview" button to see which skills will be presented to your student.)
• Pre-made assessments: If your student has never taken a Phonics or Phonological Awareness assessment in the past, Literably will automatically populate the pre-made screener according to your student's grade level. You can also use this drop-down to select a screener for a different grade level. This might be useful, for example, if you have a second grader to whom you would like to administer a first grade Phonics screener. The questions for these screeners have been selected based on appropriate learning progression for each grade level. 
• Custom assessments: If you are interested in gathering data about specific phonics or phonological awareness skills for your students, you can create a custom assessment by selecting 5-20 subskills to present to the student. 
  • First, select the main skill using the "Skill" drop-down.
  • Select 1 or more subskills using the "Sub Skills" drop-down. 
  • Use the "+ Add Skills" button to add more skills.

4. Click "Save" to save your selections.

5. If assigning the same text to multiple students, use the bulk assignment feature.

To manually select the same assessment for multiple students, check the boxes in front of their names, and then the "Assign Next Assessments" button in the top-right corner of your dashboard:

6. After finishing with one type of FS assessment, assign your students to the other type.

After your students finish taking one type of Foundational Skills assessment (e.g., Phonological Awareness), you will need to manually assign them the other type (e.g., Phonics) in order for them to assess on both Foundational Skills assessments. Literably will not automatically switch students from Phonics to Phonological Awareness, or vice versa.

7. When ready to assess Oral Reading Fluency, update the Next Assessment selection.

After your student completes a Foundational Skills assessment, Literably will assign a new Phonics or Phonological Awareness assessment to your student. When you are ready to assess your students in Oral Reading Fluency, use the "Assign Next Assignment" button to toggle the "Category" to Oral Reading Fluency. Literably will save and automatically populate the recommended ORF next assessment level and text for the student, but you can manually change the "Reading Level" and "Reading" if you would like: