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Erin York created this resource as part of an independent study during her Master of Education. She chose this topic after having many questions about benchmark literacy testing as a parent with kids in Ontario public schools. She plans to continue developing parent-centric resources that make Ontario education systems more transparent and accessible for families.
At a Glance Summary
- Acadience is a universal evidence-based check that assesses if students need extra literacy support.
- Your child scoring 'below benchmark' means they need extra help – it does not mean failure.
- You, as a parent, are informed about and can support your child at home in addition to the supports they receive at school.
Want to know more about this but in a video format? The Upper Canada District School Board held a webinar for parents that explained what the Acadience assessment is, how the testing is done, and what you can do to help your child at home.
Did your child come in below benchmark on the Acadience reading assessment?
First, take a deep breath. There is no need to panic. Scoring below benchmark does not mean your child can’t or won’t catch up. It means they need some extra support right now.
Acadience is a quick check-in assessment that teachers in Ontario schools use early in the school year in Senior Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 to see how each student is doing with age-appropriate key reading skills. The assessment helps teachers identify kids who might benefit from extra literacy support and pinpoints the specific skills kids may need help with. Kids who score lower than the benchmark are then given targeted support that helps them improve those skills.
How does Acadience testing work?
You can find the Acadience Reading K-6 Assessment Manual on their website for more detailed breakdowns.
According to Policy/Program 168 (2023), early literacy screeners are required to be administered to all students in Senior Kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 near the beginning of the school year in Ontario publicly-funded schools. Administering the screeners at the beginning of the year means that students who don't meet the benchmark are able to receive additional supports as soon as possible.
- Students who meet the benchmark in the fall assessment have their scores recorded on their report card. It is optional for them to retake the test later in the year.
- If a student scores below the benchmark in the fall, their parents are notified and supports and tiered interventions begin as soon as possible. It is mandated that students repeat the literacy assessment again in March if they scored below the benchmark in the fall.
Benchmark
When your child takes the Acadience Reading assessment, their score is compared to thousands of other children’s scores, which shows if your child’s reading skills are on track for their grade.
Students’ assessments are put into three levels based on their scores:
At or Above Benchmark: On track, no further support needed
Below Benchmark: May need some extra support
Well Below Benchmark: Likely needs significant, targeted support
Remember, scoring below benchmark isn’t a failure. It is a sign that extra support can help your child build stronger literacy skills. Your child can still thrive as a reader with a little extra support.
What is tested?
Each grade tests in a different way. In Ontario, assessment is required from Senior Kindergarten to Grade 2.
Skills are assessed in Senior Kindergarten through two one-minute sessions.
- First Sound Fluency - This assessment measures how well a child can hear and say the first sound in a word. For example, saying the word 'cat', asking what the first sound in the word is 'cuh'. This is starting to build phonological awareness which means understanding the different sounds that a word is composed of.
- Letter Naming Fluency - students are shown upper and lower case letters and are asked to say the names of the letters.
Skills are assessed in Grade 1 through 3 one-minute sessions.
- Letter Naming Fluency - This is the same assessment that is performed in Senior Kindergarten. Students are shown upper and lower case letters and are asked to say the name of the letters. The benchmark for Grade 1 is higher than it is in Senior Kindergarten.
- Segmenting Words into Sounds - In Senior Kindergarten, students are asked to identify the first sound in a word. In Grade 1, students are asked to segment a word into sounds. So, a student would be asked to identify all of the sounds in a word like jump: J | U | M | P.
- Nonsense word fluency - to test how much students know the sounds, they are asked to read, 'nonsense' words. This is a powerful tool because it shows that students are able to segment all of the sounds in a word. They don't use real words because students may know them by sight, making it hard to figure out their knowledge. For example, a nonsense word might be R E G.
In Grade 2, the assessment is a little bit longer (takes around 10 minutes) and consists of two parts.
- Nonsense word fluency - students complete a nonsense word assessment just like in Grade 1, but with a higher benchmark for the number of nonsense words that are read.
- Fluency passages - there are three one-minute oral reading fluency passages. Students are asked to read each one for one minute each then asked to retell what they've read. The score is calculated by the median of all three.
The Ontario Government's early literacy screening policy allows school boards to choose to provide assessments in either the language of instruction of the program or the language of the school board in which they are enrolled. It is best to ask your child's teacher what language they are being tested in.
If they are assessed in French, the assessment works in the same way as the English assessment, it just uses French language and pronunciation instead of English.
Scoring
How Scores are Assessed
Students are scored on their assessment in two ways:
- A score for each measure
- A score that includes all of the tests together
Each score is then compared to the relevant benchmark to determine where a student stands in relation to the benchmark.
Have questions about this information? Talk to your teacher who can help you understand what the scores mean and what you could work on with your child at home.
Notes on Scoring:
- Discontinue Rule: to make sure students don't become frustrated, teachers will stop the assessment if students don't complete a certain amount of each assessment correctly.
- Approved Accommodations: Some accommodations are approved to use with the test because they are unlikely to change how the assessment functions. These include things like enlarged text, lighting, and colouring adjustments for students with visual impairments, the use of assistive technology for students with hearing impairments, and the use of a marker or ruler to help focus students.
- Unapproved Accommodations: These are needed by the students but are likely to change how the assessment functions. For example, a student may have an Individual Education Plan (IEP) that requires untimed assessments. The assessment could measure the accuracy but not the fluency in this case. It is best to talk to your child's teacher to explore what the score means in relation to their plan.
How do I help my child?
How Students Receive Support at School
The first important thing to understand is that the Ontario Government's Policy/Program 168 explicitly states what supports need to be provided in schools.
- Tier 1: All students receive Universal Design for Learning classroom instruction. Universal Design for Learning presents information in ways that adapt to the learner instead of asking the learner to adapt to the information. This is how literacy is taught to all students in the classroom, regardless of how they scored on the assessment.
- Tier 2: Students who need extra help based on their assessment receive additional small-group support in addition to the Universal Design for Learning classroom instruction. So if your child scored below benchmark, they would be receiving small-group support.
- Tier 3: Students with more significant or ongoing challenges receive the most intensive support, often in smaller groups or individually. If they still need additional help on top of tier two, this is what would be happening.
If students continue to struggle with these supports, teachers are directed to work with their principal to determine what additional supports might be needed. Ontario Government's Policy/Program 168 explicitly outlines that the school’s special education teachers, in-school support, and other board supports should be engaged to determine the next steps of support.
What can I do at home to help my child who didn't meet the benchmark?
What should I do right now?
- Talk to your child's teacher about what skills your child needs support with.
- Ask what supports are being provided for your child at school.
What should I do to help my child at home?
The best thing to do is to figure out ways to integrate small literacy activities into your day-to-day life in a way that is natural and sustainable for everyone (specifically for you as a parent). Fit in a few minutes' worth of games while you wait for a bus, while you are grocery shopping, while you are stuck in traffic, while you are prepping dinner, etc. A few minutes a day can add up and help reinforce the work your child is doing at school. A few minutes is also far less daunting for both you and your child.
Hopefully, you were able to find out which pieces of the assessment your child needs to work on from your child's teacher.
- Go on a letter hunt. Write five different letters in both upper- and lowercase on 10 sticky notes. Hide them around a room and send your child on a hunt to find the matches. Once they’re paired up, talk about each letter and its sound. For example: “Here we have d. It makes the /d/ sound. What can you find in this room that starts with that sound?” This idea was inspired by BusyToddler.
- Make bath time a literacy game. Have some uppercase and lowercase letter magnets or foam bath letters? Use them to practise matching letters, or turn it into a race by seeing how quickly your child can find each pair. Add a stopwatch if your child loves a little friendly competition.
- Make up silly words. Grab some letter magnets or foam bath letters and build three-letter words using two consonants and a vowel. Sound them out together, then let your child create five or six letter silly words for you to read. The goal isn’t to make real words. It’s to practise putting sounds together. It is also helpful to let your kids see you try and work out how to pronounce a silly word.
- Get silly with storytime. The Book with No Pictures by B.J. Novak is packed with ridiculous words and sounds. Invite your child to help you sound out the silly words.
- Keep a literacy kit in the car. Stash a small dry-erase board and marker in the car. Choose three letters for your child to write, then challenge them to put the sounds together. It’s an easy way to sneak in a few minutes of practice while you’re on the go.
- Turn I-Spy into a sound game. Instead of saying “I spy something blue,” choose a sound: “I spy something that starts with /s/.” A sign, sock, or seat could all work!
- Play “I’m Going to the Store.” Start with, “I’m going to the store and I’m going to buy cheese.” Your child has to add something that starts with the same sound. Keep going until you run out of ideas. Cheese, chicken, Cheetos, chocolate… the sillier the list, the better.
- Talk like a robot. For older kids, say a word in slow, choppy “robot” sounds. See if they can blend the sounds together and figure out your word.
- Racecar the word. Write a word on a piece of paper. Have your child sound it out slowly, then challenge them to “race car” the word by blending the sounds together smoothly.
- Become word detectives. Give your child little mysteries to solve using the words they see around them. At bath time, point out the labels on the shampoo and conditioner bottles and ask them to figure out which one is shampoo by sounding out the first few letters. You can do the same thing with ingredient labels while baking.
Build confidence with books. Have your child read a simple book to you, or take turns reading pages together. Keep it fun and choose books connected to their interests. If dinosaurs, hockey or space are their thing, use that enthusiasm to keep them reading. The goal is to build confidence, accuracy and a love of reading.
- Your Local Library: There are so many resources at your local library! Most Ontario libraries have a children’s librarian who can help you find decodable books, or books that are specific to your child’s interest, or decodable books in French.
- teachyourmonster.org: a free, interactive website with phonics games for kids
- Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation has a large number of different resources and ideas for how to use books at home to help in different ways.
- Reading Rockets is a national public media literacy initiative based in the United States that brings the best research-based strategies to early literacy to life. They have a grade-level specific page with a long list of different activities that includes phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.
I know many parents who have questioned their decision to enroll their children in French Immersion after seeing the benchmark results, feeling uncertain about how to support their kids with the skills they need to develop. Remember, your children will receive additional support at school, and there are plenty of ways you can help them at home, even if you don’t speak French. If your child has Dyslexia, Dyslexia Canada has an FAQ on French Immersion and an article about French Immersion that may be helpful for some parents.
Activities for non-French speaking parents with kids in French Immersion
If you don’t speak French and your child is not meeting the literacy benchmarks, it might feel overwhelming.
The good news: research shows that literacy skills that your child develops in one language can transfer to the other. For example, while the letters may not sound the same and the words are different between French and English, the skill of blending sounds together remains the same across languages. Working on literacy skills in your child's first language can be beneficial to the second language.
This means finding literacy supports in your community in English can also help in French. For example, in Kingston, BGC has a TruePhonics in-person program that gives instruction to both parents and kids together in 30-minute sessions in English but there aren’t any similar programs for French.
Just remember that French Immersion students might be on slightly different footing than some other kids in the class as they may not have received English literacy instruction in their French Immersion classroom, as it is not required by the curriculum until Grades 3 or 4.
Adding in French Literacy Activities
When you are working on literacy activities with your child, and it is an activity that they are enjoying, you can always try to add in French to the equation. For example, if you were doing lower case and upper case letter matching activity, walk through the activity in English, and then ask them if they know what the French sound of that letter is. If they do know, let them be the teacher and instruct you on how to say it in French. If they are able to, you can always ask for a French word that starts with that letter.
Rewards in French
As I only speak very basic French and my children are highly motivated by rewards and screens, I have found working on the French Duolingo lessons together to be a great reward. It gives my kids a chance to be the teacher for me, and allows us to work on something together. I usually set a timer for 5-10 minutes to let my kids know how long we have to practice for before we start the reward activity.
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