The Multitudes screener is administered one-to-one by an educator to a student, with paired devices.
Credit: Courtesy of UCSF Dyslexia Center
Teachers across California are rushing to learn how to test students on vocabulary, how well they know their letters and the sounds they make, and how quickly they can name objects or letters in a row.
These are some of the skills to be measured by new screening tests that school districts are using for the first time to evaluate all children in kindergarten through second grade to see if they may be at risk for reading difficulties, such as dyslexia.
Alongside new laws that aim to change the way reading is taught in school and how teachers are prepared to do so, the screenings — available in English and Spanish — form part of a comprehensive, yet fragmented, state literacy plan now being rolled out after years in the making to get more California children reading by the third grade.
The goal of the screenings is to provide teachers and parents with early indications of areas to work on to help children learn to read, and over time, could possibly point to a student’s need for further evaluation.
More than 100 teachers and administrators from at least 33 school districts and charter schools logged in to a recent online training on Multitudes, one of four different screeners recommended by a state panel after California passed a law in 2023 requiring the screenings. Mariah Pospisil, applied research manager at the UC San Francisco Dyslexia Center, which developed the screening tool, walked participants through what the test would look like for both the teacher and the student.
When the screener begins, a group of cartoon animals pop up on the child’s screen — a little bear, big bear, seal, fox, raccoon, quail and blue-bellied lizard. “Hi, I’m Poppy,” says the bear. “My friends and I would like to play some games with you. Are you ready?”
The animals, all typical of different regions in California, exemplify the care UCSF took to include differences in dialect, culture and geographic region, to make the screener accurate for all children in California, said Francesca Pei, chief operating officer at Multitudes. She said it was important to try to eliminate biases.
“Some kids in California maybe were never exposed to snow, for example, so you can’t have so many questions about winter or snow,” said Pei.
The UCSF Dyslexia Center spent five years developing the screening tool, with millions of dollars in state funding, and tested it out on more than 15,000 California children.
Depending on the grade level, students are asked to complete different tasks. Kindergartners, for example, are asked to name letters and to identify how a word might change if part of the word is removed. For example, they are shown three pictures — a coat, a large boat and some eggs. Then they listen to the word “sailboat” and are told to choose the picture that shows what is left if you take the word “sail” away.
First graders are asked to name letter sounds and read words, and second graders read and spell words. All the students are tested on vocabulary and on rapid automated naming — how fast and accurately they can name objects or letters in a row.
The entire test is designed to take no longer than 10 minutes per child. After the student finishes, the teacher administering the test will see results within seconds, showing which areas the student may need more help, and offering ideas for lessons. Once all students in a class or school have finished the screening, teachers and administrators can also analyze results by class or grade.
“The data came back so quickly. I was shocked. It was instantaneous. Within seconds, you pulled up the data and you could see where they were at,” said Thea Patrick, director of curriculum and instruction at Loomis Union School District, a tiny district near Sacramento that was one of several that piloted Multitudes last year.
Cheri McClaughry, a reading intervention teacher in Loomis, said the district previously used a screener in the spring only for first graders.
“We weren’t really getting the data until the next school year,” said McClaughry. “What I loved [about Multitudes] is we’re doing all three grades at once and doing it earlier in the year so we can do interventions for students that need them.”
Earleen Brooks, a reading specialist who helped pilot Multitudes in the Compton Unified School District last year, said she used data from the screenings to show parents what their children needed to work on in small groups.
“I explained to them, ‘This is not a diagnosis of dyslexia or anything, but these are some things that we could use,’” Brooks said. “I was able to relate what we’re doing in intervention to even address some of those issues that were printed out.”
Julie Fong, a literacy instructional coach in the Elk Grove Unified School District near Sacramento, said she’s hopeful the screenings will help teachers get more children reading in the early grades.
“Hopefully, it’s going to identify students that might be at risk earlier so that we can intervene earlier, and get them reading and writing, as opposed to waiting until like fourth grade, and now we’re trying to assess them for special education,” Fong said.
Screening multilingual children
Schools must administer the screening once before the end of the school year. Many experts recommend students — especially kindergartners — not be screened at the beginning of the year, before they have had a chance to learn.
One of the concerns raised by advocates that nearly derailed the bill to mandate the screenings was that students who speak languages other than English could be flagged for reading difficulties simply because they did not understand English.
“It’s very clear that the needs of monolingual native English speakers can be identified quite easily through screening,” said Monica Aguirre, coordinator of multilingual education and global achievement for the San Diego County Office of Education. “But when we think about English learners, the task becomes more complex.”
The bill that ultimately passed the Legislature and was signed into law requires that if students are not sufficiently proficient in English, they must be assessed in their primary language.
Three of the screening tools are available in both English and Spanish, and experts recommend that schools assess most students who speak Spanish at home in both English and Spanish, since they may have developed different skills in each language.
“If they do assess the kids in both languages, and they can get a comprehensive picture, that’s more than what some teachers have had in the past, and that really might show teachers, ‘Oh there’s something I can build upon. They know these sounds in their home language,’” said Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, strategic adviser for Californians Together, a nonprofit organization that advocates for English learners.
However, the screeners are not available in languages other than English and Spanish. Students in California speak more than 100 languages at home. At the virtual training conducted by Pospisil, participants asked how to screen children whose primary language is Arabic or Mixtec, an indigenous language from southern Mexico.
The answer is somewhat complicated. Each screener has instructions on how to assess whether a student knows enough English or Spanish to be assessed in the language. For those who are not proficient enough in either language, districts have to come up with a different protocol by talking with parents, observing the child and considering their developmental history, educational history and literacy progress, according to the California Department of Education.
“We don’t want to just give the screener in English if the student doesn’t have adequate minimum language proficiency, because then our scores won’t mean much,” said Pospisil during the training. “The scores will just reaffirm that, ‘yes, this student doesn’t quite know English yet.’”
Yet some worry that due to confusion or misinterpretation of the law, some schools will still screen students in English, even if they are at the very beginning stages of learning the language.
“Some people have interpreted the legislation to mean, ‘Thou shalt screen,’” said Aguirre, meaning that some believe they have to screen every child no matter what. “Yet we see language in the legislation that says the student has to have sufficient English.”
Using the data
The screeners for risk of reading difficulties cannot be used to diagnose a child with dyslexia or other disabilities. Instead, they are meant to give teachers and principals a better idea early on what kinds of interventions students may need.
“The big question that has come up every time I’ve been to the training, ’cause I’ve been through it a couple times now, is what next? If a student is identified ‘at risk,’ what are those next steps? And I just don’t think that that’s been clarified yet,” said Fong.
Aguirre and colleagues at the San Diego County Office of Education have been offering a series of workshops for districts about how to use the data they glean from reading difficulty risk screeners.
Aguirre said schools should not rush to pull students out of class for extra help or for a special education evaluation because of the results of the screening. Instead, she said, teachers should first use the results to change what they are doing inside the classroom and ensure that children are receiving the instruction they need, in addition to English language development if they are English learners.
“We’re trying to disseminate this message that a student being at risk for dyslexia does not make them at risk for the rest of their lives of not being able to become a good reader,” Aguirre said.