7 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Literacy Screener

Dr. Nadine Gaab explains the 7 most important factors to consider when selecting the right screener to identify children in your school, classroom, or district who may be at ris.

1. Assessing Key Skills
   

   First of all, you want to make sure that it assesses all important skills that we know are important for learning to read.

2. Evidence-Based Screener
   

Secondly, you want to make sure that the screener is evidence-based, that there is some research behind it, and it's not just someone putting some words together and saying, "This is a great screener because it worked last year in my classroom."

3. Characteristics of the Norming Group

What are the characteristics of the norming group? Let me give you an example. If you are in an urban school with many children from maybe lower-income-status families, you want to make sure that this was represented when the screener was normed. Meaning: Were kids included from low SES families when they were norming the screener?

4. Time Considerations

You also want to make sure that the overall time it takes for you to screen the children works in your classroom. There are very short screeners and very long screeners, so you want to make sure that this works with your school and your what we call a screening protocol.

For example, you could screen as early as the summer before kindergarten, which may give you a little more time since you get the kids in individually. Or you may need to screen within the first week of kindergarten when you have very limited time.

5. Sensitivity and Specificity

You want to look at the sensitivity and specificity of a screener. Sensitivity is correctly identifying those who will develop a disability, and specificity is correctly identifying those who will not develop a reading disability.

You can also call it the false positives and false negatives. False positives occur when a child is identified as being at risk but is not actually at risk, which can be due to problems with the instrument, the day they were tested, or perhaps they were tired and didn't have breakfast, etc.. Then you have false negatives, which is when a kid is actually at risk, but you are not detecting it with your instrument.

6. Managing False Positives and False Negatives

As a district, we recommend that you catch all the kids who are at risk, so you would have no false negatives. However, that could lead to more false positives. You can move these two bars and decide, based on the resources and the number of testers you have, etc., how you want to adjust the discrepancy between the false positives and the false negatives.

SUGGESTED CITATION

National Center on Improving Literacy. (2025). [Infographic title]. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs. Retrieved from improvingliteracy.org.