Early years assessments

Mandatory testing month: January

Starting in January 2025, screening will be required in literacy for all Kindergarten students in January of each year.

All school authorities must use government provided or approved screening assessment tools in English or French to assess the literacy of Kindergarten students.

The government-provided literacy screening assessments for Kindergarten are available free of charge and consist of the:

• English Letter Name-Sound (LeNS) assessment – designed to ensure a student has the foundational phonics skills to develop into an independent reader. In Kindergarten, children will be assessed on letter names and sounds only.
• Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) is intended to measure children’s letter sound awareness in spoken words (for example children may be asked to tell what the first sound in a word is, such as in the word cat).
• Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) test, assesses fluency and speed by asking the child to name a set of items as quickly as they can.
• Test Nom et son des lettres (NSLe) is the French equivalent of the English LeNS Test. It assesses a child’s ability to name letters and to sound out single letters in French (for example, a, s, r).
• Test de dépistage de la conscience phonologique (TDCP) is the French equivalent of the English PAST Test. It measures children’s phonemic awareness in French spoken words.
• Test Dénomination rapide sérielle (DRS) is the French equivalent of the English RAN Test.

Mandatory testing month: January

The Kindergarten Provincial Numeracy Screening Assessment tool has been available for optional use by school authorities for 2 years and is now the government-provided numeracy screening assessment. This tool is available for use free of charge.

The screening assessment tool is a collection of tasks designed to help teachers understand the child’s foundational knowledge of the number system. The tool consists of tasks that assess core number knowledge, including:

• counting (for example, reciting a number sequence, counting sets of items)
• naming numbers (for example, the child tells the name of the number on a card)
• comparing numbers (for example, the child may be asked to cross out the larger of two numbers)

The kindergarten numeracy assessment is available in French and English.

School authorities must use the government provided or approved English or French literacy assessments. It is important to understand the focus of each assessment to ensure the appropriateness of the screening for students.

The government-provided screening assessments for literacy are available free of charge and include the:

• Kindergarten literacy assessments used at the beginning of Grade 1 in September only, which are different compared to the screening assessments used later in Grade 1:
  • Letter Name-Sound (LeNS)/ Test Nom et son des lettres (NSLe) assessment – for letter names and sounds only.
  • Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST)/Test de dépistage de la conscience phonologique (TDCP).
  • Random Automatized Naming (RAN)/Dénomination rapide sérielle (DRS).
• LeNS assessment – designed to ensure a student has the foundational phonics skills to develop into an independent reader. LeNS assesses a student’s ability to sound out single letters and letter combinations (for example, n, d, e, ch, ay, oa, oy).
• Test Nom et son des lettres (NSLe) – the French equivalent of the English LeNS Test. It assesses a student’s ability to name letters, sound out single letters and French letter combinations (for example, a, s, r, ou, ch, ain).
• Castles and Coltheart 3 (CC3) assessment – an English word-reading test designed to identify the nature of a student’s reading difficulties. CC3 assesses a student’s ability to:
  • recall familiar and irregular words (for example, take, hand, island, cough)
  • sound out non-words (for example, norf, framp, gurve) that were created specially for this assessment and have no meaning
• Test Castle et Coltheart 3 (CC3) – the French equivalent of the English CC3 assessment.

Timing of literacy screening assessments

School authorities must use the government provided or approved numeracy screening assessments, available in English and French.

The numeracy screening assessments are a collection of tasks designed to help teachers understand their students’ underlying knowledge of the number system, basic number operations and proportional reasoning skills. The assessment results can be used to help teachers identify and address gaps in their students’ foundational understanding of numbers.

These tasks identify and focus on core number knowledge:

• counting (for example, counting sets of items, naming the next number in a sequence)
• number identification (for example, writing the numbers after hearing them)
• number patterns (for example, identifying if the numbers presented are in the correct order)
• the order of numbers and the ways numbers are related to each other (for example, placing numbers on a number line)
• number facts (for example, addition and subtraction)

The government provided and approved assessments currently used in numeracy will continue to be used to screen students in grades 1 to 3.

Timing of numeracy screening assessments