ALPACA - Assessing Letter Knowledge and Phonemic Awareness Classroom App

Project Description

In February 2022 the ALPACA (Assessing Letter Knowledge and Phonemic Awareness Classroom App) project was granted funding of €300,000 through the Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund to create and develop an evidence-based, digital tool to assess young children’s early literacy skills. The purpose of ALPACA is principally to:

1. identify children’s foundational literacy skills and inform the instruction required for them to become successful readers; and
2. regularly monitor the progress of children who are receiving instruction in phonemic awareness and letter knowledge.

Reading proficiency is a high-stakes priority all over the world with numerous international studies regularly documenting the reading proficiency and literacy levels of young children (eg. Programme of International Student Assessment [PISA] and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study [PIRLS]). While many children acquire the skills necessary to become proficient readers with relative ease, a concerning number of children continue to struggle with reading development. For example, in the most up-to-date PIRLS (2016) study, 24%, 17% and 14% of Australian, British and American 10-year-old students, respectively, performed at or below the low international PIRLS benchmark, with a further 7%, 5% and 2% unable to read at the lowest international benchmark. The screening of early reading skills is crucial if teachers are to identify and reach children potentially ‘at risk’ for later reading difficulties. Early identification is vital in order to provide children with the evidence-based interventions they need as early as possible to help prevent future reading difficulties.

Current practices for assessing young children’s early literacy skills rely heavily on traditional, paper-based forms of assessment. Such assessments are cumbersome and time consuming. Ideally, a junior infant’s early literacy skills should be assessed and monitored up to three times during his/her first school year. If a teacher has 30 junior infant pupils in his/her class, implementing these traditional forms of assessment amounts to a considerable loss of instructional time. Worryingly, as a consequence of the time-consuming nature of these paper-based assessments, in many cases, these vital assessments are not conducted at all. This results in children who may present as ‘at risk’ for future reading difficulties, not being identified early enough and missing out on crucial early intervention. On a more positive note, the digital age has offered us a wonderful opportunity to use technology to support the early assessment and monitoring of these skills known to predict and support reading proficiency.

A team of colleagues from Marino Institute of Education, Trinity College Dublin and Learnovate have developed a digital tool to assess children’s phonemic awareness skills and letter knowledge (ALPACA). It is hoped that the time efficient manner and the ease of usability of the digital tool will promote the assessment of young children’s early literacy skills in schools. A year-long school trial of the tool was implemented and ALPACA was administered in a range of schools both within Ireland and abroad (Northern Ireland, Texas, Malaysia, and Dubai). In phase one of implementation in September, just under 1000 children were assessed using ALPACA. The children were also assessed in January and May to monitor their progress in developing these early literacy skills.

ALPACA consists of 12 early literacy tasks, each composed of several different items. The tasks include opportunities to assess children’s rhyming, initial and final phoneme isolation, phoneme blending and segmentation, and phoneme deletion skills and their knowledge of the letters of the alphabet. Picture stimuli have been carefully selected to minimise the demands on children’s working memory.

Individual tasks are short in duration to accommodate young children’s concentration spans. Each item requires a non-verbal, receptive response whereby children touch an image to respond. All tasks are self-administered by the children on a tablet and scores are automatically sent to a teacher dashboard for later analysis by teachers. It is hoped that this digital tool will become a crucial support for teachers in identifying young children who may be ‘at risk’ for future reading difficulties in order to provide them with the support and interventions needed as early as possible.

Funder

Enterprise Ireland €300,000

Dates

2022-2023

Research Team

Dr Jennifer O’Sullivan (PI)

Dr Anne Devitt (TCD)

Team from Learnovate

Outputs

For more on ALPACA see the website here

O’Sullivan, J. (2023, January) ALPACA: Assessing Phonemic Awareness and Letter Knowledge Classroom App. Exploring EdTech in Ireland. 6, 11-15.

O’Sullivan, J. & Devitt, A. (2023, April 2-4). A proactive and preventive approach to early literacy intervention.  [Paper presentation]. World Literacy Summit, University of Oxford, Oxford.

O’Sullivan, J. (2022, October 20). Assessing early literacy skills: ALPACA. [Paper presentation]. Learnovation Conference, Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland