Overview
The Phonological and Print Awareness Scale (PPA Scale) measures early literacy skills and allows examiners to track the development of these skills over time.
Suitable for
Suitable for use with children ages 3 years, 6 months to 8 years, 11 months – the age range in which most children acquire phonological and print awareness.
Product Description
The PPA Scale assesses two important literacy skills that consistently demonstrate a strong, predictive relationship with later measures of reading and writing:
Phonological awareness: The ability to recognise and manipulate the individual sound structures of a whole word without any reliance on print
Print awareness: The understanding of the elements of print, including alphabet knowledge and concepts about print (for example, reading starts at the top left of a page)
The PPA Scale uses a receptive, multiple-choice response format and is ideal for assessing young children.
Using a colourful self-standing easel, the examiner reads instructions and the examinee only has to point to indicate his or her answer – verbal responses are not required. This format makes the PPA Scale useful for evaluating children who have speech impairments and/or expressive language difficulties or are simply reticent.
The PPA Scale has 69 items representing six tasks, which can be evaluated for qualitative purposes. The six tasks measure:
- Rhyming: Ability to recognise rhymes, which is an early phonological skill requiring recognition of the sound structure of language
- Print Knowledge: Ability to recognise important elements of print, including identification of individual capital and lowercase letters
- Initial Sound Matching: Ability to isolate and match the first phoneme (smallest unit of speech sound) in a pair of words
- Final Sound Matching: Ability to isolate and match the last phoneme in a pair of words
- Sound–Symbol: Ability to isolate the initial or final phoneme (sound) and match it to the corresponding grapheme (symbol)
- Phonemic Awareness: Ability to segment the individual phonemes in a word
Discover the PPA Scale Kit and Components in this 'unboxing' video from WPS
Applications
Because of its focused age range, research-based content, and three parallel forms, the PPA Scale has many applications in school and clinical settings:
- Screening to identify children who are behind their peers
- Identifying strengths and areas needing improvement
- Tracking progress over time using the growth score and three parallel forms
- Researching the effectiveness of early literacy programs.
Results are useful for any professional who measures early literacy skills, including speech and language therapists and psychologists.
Identify areas for improvement and monitor progress
Three parallel forms (A, B, and C), each with an accompanying easel, allow examiners to identify areas needing improvement and easily track progression of these areas over time.
The PPA Scale provides a standard score for comparing a child’s performance to that of typically developing peers of the same age and a growth score that indicates a child’s progress along the continuum of phonological and print awareness abilities measured by the PPA Scale. The growth score is the best way to measure a child’s development over time. In addition, several other scores are provided: descriptive ranges, confidence interval, percentile rank, and test-age equivalent.
A Descriptive Summary on the Record Form offers a qualitative way to evaluate item- and task-level performance. It allows you to easily review the objectives of missed items and discover patterns, which can help identify areas of strength and those that need improvement.
The examinee’s overall abilities as indicated by the standard score and growth score, and the specific areas needing improvement identified by the Descriptive Summary can help inform a targeted intervention plan. This topic is expanded in the companion resource Building Early Literacy Skills: Phonological and Print Awareness Activities. This book offers age-appropriate intervention strategies to improve all the skills measured by the PPA Scale and build essential vocabulary and oral language skills.
Qualification level required:
Level 2. Please see our Test User Qualifications page for guidance.
Test Validity
A nationally representative sample of 1,104 examinees was stratified to match the 2010 U.S. Census data in terms of gender, ethnicity, Hispanic origin, region, and head of household’s education level as an estimation of SES (socioeconomic status). A validation sample of 162 children with a speech, language, or other clinical diagnosis was also collected. Analyses of these samples show that the PPA Scale differentiates typical children from those with a learning disability, reading disorder, developmental delay, autism spectrum disorder, or intellectual disability. In addition, it has high internal consistency, test-retest, and alternate form reliability. Further studies provide evidence of the content, construct, convergent, and discriminate validity of the PPA Scale.
Administration Time
10 to 15 minutes
Publication Date
2014
