Activity-based Learning plays a crucial role in early literacy. 

To optimize its potential, it’s essential to understand what it entails, its core element of active engagement, how it integrates with other learning approaches, and how it extends beyond instruction into assessments. 

This article covers it all, finishing with looking at ways in which activity-based learning impacts early literacy assessments.

Definition of Activity-based Learning 

Activity-based Learning refers to an educational approach that engages students through hands-on activities, allowing them to actively participate and interact with the learning material.

This method emphasizes ‘doing’ over passive listening, encouraging children to explore, experiment, and practice skills in real-time.

In early literacy, this involves tasks like phonics games, interactive story-telling, and word-sorting activities.

Play-based learning shares all the same characteristics as activity-based learning in terms of being action-driven and interactive, but play is only one type of activity. 

Activity-based Learning extends beyond play-based learning. 

While play-based learning emphasizes exploration through games and playful activities, activity-based learning also includes experiential learning, project-based tasks, problem-solving activities, and collaborative exercises.

Why Give Importance to Activities? 

Activities are crucial in early literacy development because they provide opportunities for practical application of learned skills. 

In evidence-based early literacy, there is no substitute for explicit instruction. 

But in order to demonstrate the taught concepts or practice these lessons for mastery, there needs to be further engagement in the classroom. Often, this takes the form of activities.

Some of the most popular forms of activities are mentioned below, all of which help solidify students’ understanding of literacy concepts:

Practice

Research highlights that consistent and targeted practice, especially through interactive and engaging activities, significantly improves reading outcomes and long-term literacy success.

The Education Endowment Foundation lists evidence-based strategies to practice early literacy, building on approaches that foster communication and oral language. 

These methods highlight the importance of active learning through questioning and discussion, emphasizing activity-based learning’s role in effective literacy instruction.

Project-based Learning

Projects allow for an in-depth exploration of literacy topics. There can be individual projects or those that involve collaborative group work.

For instance, building a class storybook can improve understanding of narrative structure, vocabulary, and grammar.

In an article featured by the International Literacy Association, Dr. Miranda S. Fitzgerald, assistant professor of reading and literacy education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, highlights instances where early learners outperform their peers when engaged in project-based learning.

Learning Centers

Literacy centers provide children with the opportunity to engage in different activities that target various literacy skills. They are also commonly referred to as literacy stations.

Centers can include phonics games, sentence-building tasks, or storytelling activities, which allow students to demonstrate their skills.

An added benefit of these centers is that they can be used by multiple groups of children on a rotating basis.

The Greater Domain of Activity-based Learning

Earlier, it was established that play-based learning is a subset of activity-based learning. 

Besides play-based learning, activity-based learning holds great dominion over other pedagogical approaches, particularly experiential, and multisensory learning. 

All these types of learning contain activities that are mentioned below:

Play-based Learning

Play-based learning offers children a natural and engaging way to grasp literacy concepts through exploration, experimentation, and interaction.

In the context of early literacy, play invites children to immerse themselves in language activities, such as letter-matching games, word-building with blocks, or storytelling with puppets. 

These playful scenarios provide a low-pressure environment where children develop phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and sentence structure while simply having fun.

The importance of play lies in its ability to seamlessly blend imagination with literacy development. 

Activities like role-playing as a character from a book or creating words with magnetic letters serve to solidify abstract literacy concepts by associating them with familiar, hands-on experiences.

Experiential Learning

Experiential learning in early literacy engages children in meaningful, real-world literacy tasks that allow them to directly apply what they’ve learned. 

Activities such as reading environmental print like road signs or menus, or participating in a simulated post office help contextualize reading and writing, turning abstract concepts into tangible, everyday experiences. 

Children are no longer passive recipients of information; they become active participants in literacy.

The immersive nature of experiential learning fosters higher retention rates and deepens understanding, as it links classroom instruction to practical, real-world use.

Multisensory Learning

Activity-based learning often incorporates multisensory techniques to enhance literacy learning, particularly by engaging multiple senses, such as sight, touch, sound, and movement. 

Multisensory learning taps into different parts of the brain, allowing children to process and retain information more effectively. 

For example, tracing letters in sand while vocalizing the corresponding sound or using color-coded cards to group words by phonics rules appeals to tactile, visual, and auditory learners simultaneously.

This holistic approach strengthens neural connections, helping children absorb and retain literacy skills at a deeper level. 

Activity in Assessments

Thus far, activities are described in the form of teaching and practicing. What about assessing?

Assessments in activity-based learning environments often take the form of quizzes, games, or interactive tasks that allow teachers to evaluate literacy progress while children engage in learning. 

This approach ensures that assessments are a natural extension of the learning process. In this way, they are as much as assessments for learning, as assessment of learning. 

In other words, activity-based assessments can be said to be more informal, and can be compared to formative assessments, which are absolutely indispensable to early learning success.

While all kinds of assessments are needed in an early literacy assessment toolkit, activity-based learning’s strong connection to formative assessment certainly makes it a force to reckon with.

Especially considering that formative assessments such as progress monitoring assessments occur more frequently than other assessments, they need to be fun, engaging and interactive. 

Otherwise, their powers of providing real-time insights into a child’s reading ability may wear off, due to both teacher and student burnout. 

Styles of Assessments and Expression of Activity-based Learning

There are many styles of assessments. Activity-based learning expresses itself in many ways in how it impacts early literacy. Here are some of the best early literacy activities for teaching foundational reading skills.

Whether you need help in choosing assessment design factors, or balancing considerations such as control, perspective, frequency and timeline, there are many great reads from the Sprig Blog that detail each aspect.

Focusing on activity-based learning, which of these particular assessment types is best suited for activities?

Teacher-led Assessments occur when teacher’s guide assessments. They ask questions and score the responses appropriately as needed.

Interactive Student Assessments occur when students engage in literacy tasks independently while teachers observe and record progress. They are also known as observation assessments.

Student-led Assessments occur when students engage directly with the learning material, which itself facilitates the assessment process. Teachers may oversee the activity, but they do not intervene in recording responses or observing performance.

It’s difficult to answer, because all contain activities. Whether it is the teacher facilitating the activity, or the student independently doing the activity, or both of them co-participating.

By its very nature, assessments lend themselves well to activity-based learning,but it is important to specialize in a certain style depending on the needs of the classroom. 

For example, Sprig Explorers and Sprig Reading, two tools designed for driving early literacy equity, both use activity-based learning principles in literacy evaluation.

While Sprig Explorers uses game-based learning where early learners interact directly with a game, Sprig Reading leaves it up to the teacher to monitor and track reading progress. 

Both however, call upon a certain activity to be performed, the completion of which is crucial to early reading success!

Improving existing early literacy assessments in Pre-K to Grade 3 classrooms can involve two approaches:

1. Replacing an entire assessment toolkit with a completely new tool.
2. Adding something new to enhance existing assessment tools.

This article focuses on the latter, that is, specifically enhancing an existing early literacy assessment toolkit.

In this context, enhancing consists of both enriching and supplementing. 

Both approaches are discussed in this article, along with their impact on early literacy assessments and the popular tools commonly used by schools.

When these approaches are implemented together, they supercharge early literacy assessments, as the article will conclude.

Enriching Assessments VS Supplementing Assessments

VS

Enriching makes early literacy assessments better without adding any new dimensions. 

Enriching existing assessments refines their current functionality, improving efficiency, precision, or usability. It doesn’t fundamentally change the scope but improves the assessment process.

For example, consider a formative assessment that evaluates students’ understanding of phonics through an assessment  administered once a week.

Enriching this will involve providing clear instructions, how the assessment links to what students have been learning and be provided with data to improve student learning. 

Supplementing makes early literacy assessments better by giving it new features, domains and skills.

Supplementing expands assessments to include new domains and skills—additional data points, broader skill sets, or more frequent evaluation to enrich instructional decisions.

For example, that same formative assessment can be expanded by adding assessments  on  more specific foundational skills components such as segmenting in phonological awareness  or punctuation meaning in fluency.

Enhancing Early Literacy Assessment Tools Through Enrichment and Supplementation

​​When the two aspects of enhancement are implemented together, they can supercharge existing Pre-K to 3 assessments. It creates a powerful and more holistic assessment ecosystem that fosters improved literacy outcomes by filling in critical learning gaps.

What does this look like? To answer this, the current assessment toolkit must be analyzed. 

Each assessment tool can be enriched, supplemented, or ideally, both.

Let’s take a look at four common assessment tools. What parts of each can be enriched, and what potential missing parts can be completed?

Universal Screeners

Universal screeners offer a broad look at how students are performing across essential reading skills. They are most often administered to everyone and happen one to three times a year.

• Enrichment: The screeners can be fitted with control variable measures which can help mitigate implicit bias factors. For example, each student should be assessed only after they feel comfortable with the teacher. Familiarity with the teacher will be one control variable.

• Supplementation: Screener results can include the flagging of students near the cutoff, allowing for a second screening to eliminate false negatives. This added data point supplements the teacher’s previous understanding of identifying who truly needs help, before passing them on.

Diagnostic Assessments

Diagnostic assessments help pinpoint specific skill gaps in students struggling to meet reading benchmarks. They are typically administered to certain students, after a universal screener.

• Enrichment: For those set on manually administering assessments, the diagnostic assessments can be streamlined with adaptive questioning to lighten the workload.

• Supplementation: The diagnostic assessments can include personalized activity recommendations for those students struggling with a specific skill area.

Progress Monitoring

Progress monitoring tracks student growth over time to ensure instruction is effective. They are administered on an ongoing basis in between the universal screeners.

• Enrichment:  For those recording data manually on spreadsheets, the progress monitoring assessments can be designed to have a digital repository of this data.

• Supplementation: For those tracking broad domains like comprehension or fluency, the assessments can include the monitoring of the underlying sub skills as well, ensuring a strong and lasting reading foundation.

What About Outcome Evaluations?

Outcome evaluations measure whether students meet end-of-year goals and literacy benchmarks. They are usually administered at the end of Grade 3. 

Enriching and supplementing formative assessments (that are for learning) should lead to improved reading performance in outcome evaluation assessments (that are of learning). 

Since outcome evaluations are summative and not formative, enriching or supplementing them may risk distorting the final measure of whether students can read by a specific time.

That being said, one way to enhance outcome evaluations is by supplementing them with longitudinal data tracking. This reveals each student’s growth across skills from their baseline throughout their entire literacy journey.

Progress monitoring tools have this ability, whereby it can greatly expand the scope of a traditional end-of-year summative assessment.

Thus, it ensures that educators have a complete understanding of how students’ skills develop year-over-year.

This approach will better inform educators on whether to retain students in Grade 3, a contentious issue that can be addressed more effectively when outcome evaluation assessments are enhanced.

So yes, outcome evaluation assessments can be enhanced as well through supplementation, by ensuring they are linked to all prior progress monitoring assessments, diagnostic assessments, and screeners.

Enhancing Early Literacy Assessments With Sprig Reading

For teachers and school leaders looking to revamp their early literacy assessment strategies, Sprig Reading is a digital progress monitoring tool that enhances existing research-based programs and resources.

While it helps teachers easily monitor the progress of all students across hundreds of foundational reading skills, it also enhances and supplements other tools such as universal screeners, diagnostic assessments, and even other progress monitoring solutions that have limited scope.

Sprig Reading enriches the efficiency and user-friendliness of assessment tools by being available on tablets, web browsers and phones, and offering a simple and proven methodology to regularly monitor and track foundational reading skills against research-based benchmarks.

It also supplements these tools by providing the ability to continuously track a broader range of skills, thus adding more dimensions in frequency and skills coverage.

By enhancing the ease and speed of assessments and supplementing them with continuous insights across all foundational reading skills, Sprig Reading offers a comprehensive solution to meet the diverse needs of all students.

Whether the focus is on improving universal screeners, diagnostics, progress monitoring, or outcome evaluation, Sprig Reading provides a solution by monitoring progress differently. It offers schools a way to deliver a more complete and responsive picture of early literacy development.

Assessment is a critical component of early literacy, providing teachers with valuable insights into student progress and guiding instruction. 

Two commonly used assessment methods to guide literacy instruction in the classroom are progress monitoring assessments and benchmark screeners.  

In this blog, both progress monitoring assessments and benchmark screeners are described as formative assessments, in that they are assessments “for learning”, to help guide instruction for continuous improvement. 

Progress monitoring has the unique distinction of being assessments “as learning” as well, meaning the assessment itself, because of its high frequency usage in the classroom can be used to help students in setting their own goals, and monitoring their progress towards those goals.  

These distinctions are covered in a prior blog, “How to Improve Formative Assessments for Early Literacy?”, a must-read if you are gathering information on best assessment practices or are interested in the subject.

This blog will explore progress monitoring assessments and benchmark screeners, discuss the strengths and challenges of each, and finally describe a strategy where both can be enhanced.

When discussing each type of assessment, the operating assumption will be that they are research-based, as this is the expected standard for early learning assessments, and it’s a commitment Sprig Learning upholds across all its solutions.

This means that these assessments focus on reading skills that are supported by the latest research into what drives reading success. They also separately assess the distinct skill sets required for reading. 

As a result, teachers are able to successfully obtain the data they need to manage the diverse needs of students in their classrooms.

What is a Progress Monitoring Assessment? 

Pros VS Cons

A progress monitoring assessment can be a formal or informal formative assessment used to regularly evaluate a child’s reading expertise across multiple foundational reading skills throughout the school year.

This assessment method provides a real-time snapshot of where a student is on their reading journey.

Pros

• Offers Immediate Feedback: Provide instant insights into a student’s reading performance and an indication of how regular classroom instruction can be tweaked to better serve the student. 

• Generates Granular Level Data:  Monitor a students’ progress in multiple skills addressing their greatest needs to ensure that they are helped in the area that is inhibiting them from making progress. 

Cons

• Needs to be consistently scheduled: Although this is what is required for progress monitoring, it can be challenging for teachers to fit this into their busy schedules and be consistent with the practice. 

• Can Lead to Myopic Sight: Certain skills may be monitored regularly, especially those identified as needing more attention in more formal diagnostic assessments. But this leaves the door open for irregularity in practice of other reading skills, leading to slow progress of expertise in those areas. 

What is a Benchmark Screener?

Pros VS Cons

A benchmark screener is a more formal assessment method that evaluates specific reading skills at designated intervals throughout the school year. Common practice is for students to receive a screening assessment two to three times a year.

Standardized tests are typically used to assess foundational reading skills. These tests measure individual performance against benchmarks for the knowledge expected at a certain point in time, guiding students toward reading mastery. They can also compare individual results with the classroom’s overall average, and a historical average if that data is available.

Pros

• Ease of Comparison: Benchmark screeners provide a standardized measure, allowing for comparisons across grade levels and other students. It can indicate whether a student is on track to read successfully by Grade 3, while also showing how their reading performance compares to others in the class. This allows a teacher to understand how their entire class is responding to whole class/core instruction.

• Insight into Specific Skills: The screener provides data to help with informing instruction and illuminates specific focus areas. Specific instruction can be planned from the screener for specific skills and students.  

Cons

• Stressful for Students: Standardized tests can be intimidating and high-stakes, especially for young learners. This holds true for benchmark screeners as well. Though of course, this can always be mitigated by well-trained and experienced teachers. 

• Difficult and Costly to Implement for Teachers: Benchmark screeners require significant setup time and extensive teacher training to implement effectively and consistently. 

• Rigidity Causes Misalignment with Instruction and Student Individuality: Benchmarks are typically set and cannot be easily adjusted to instructional focus. This rigidity can lead to a disconnect between assessment outcomes and the evolving classroom needs of students. It simply is not flexible enough to capture ongoing changes in the classroom.

Additionally, benchmark screeners are not framed in  a strength-based approach and account for the diverse interests and sociocultural backgrounds of students.

How Can Teachers Make the Best Use of Each Assessment Type?

To maximize the benefits of progress monitoring assessments and benchmark screeners , teachers must use the data collected to inform classroom instruction. Some questions to consider while making the adjustments: 

1. Have we given the student enough explicit instruction? 
2. Have we given the student enough time to practice? 
3. How can we personalize our instruction and group students based on similar skill needs?

To enhance benchmark screeners, one can introduce progress monitoring assessments consistently throughout the year. 

These regular “pulse checks” on reading help familiarize students with frequent progress checks, reducing intimidation on the day of more standardized assessments.

While progress monitoring helps to make informed instructional decisions and adjustments, benchmark screeners help to set initial goals in the planning process.

By creating a system where both progress monitoring assessments and benchmark assessments have a place together in the classroom, the student stands to benefit from such an assessment culture adopted by the school.

It is advisable to intersperse benchmark assessments with progress monitoring assessments throughout the school year to ensure a well-rounded understanding of each student’s literacy journey.

How Sprig Reading Enhances Screeners and Progress Monitoring 

Sprig Reading is an educator’s digital progress monitoring tool that enhances any evidence-based early literacy program, screener or classroom resource. 

It monitors student progress as well as enhances existing assessment tools like screeners and other progress monitoring systems.

In particular, it helps teachers track student progress through continuous assessments, integrating seamlessly with benchmark screeners to provide a complete picture of student literacy over time. 

Its intuitive mechanism enables teachers to assess students on a daily and weekly basis, which helps them customize both instruction and informal assessments tailored to the whole class and individual students. 

With Sprig Reading, teachers can:

Conduct Efficient Progress Monitoring Assessments: Use the platform to streamline reading skill progress monitoring for students, where their progress in relevant reading skills that need to be taught at their grade level are regularly checked and updated.

Generate Comprehensive Reports: Produce detailed reports for each student that tracks their progress over time in each skill, but also lets teachers know where a student is based on research-based expectations for each skill. 

Thus, as a progress monitoring tool, Sprig Reading enhances the use of benchmark screeners by allowing teachers to consistently assess, track and monitor all of the foundational reading skills. 

Regardless if a school or teacher implements one or both of these assessment types, it is advisable that they strengthen these approaches by finding complementary solutions, which will not interfere but rather will serve to optimize them!

Are you looking for one solution for doing both? Or separate solutions? Or perhaps in a large enough system, you are looking at multiple solutions for doing just one assessment type?

That will come down to a question of understanding what other capabilities you are looking for in your assessment tool. You may want to read “11 Key Questions for Selecting The Right Early Literacy Assessment(s) for Your School”.