What assessment would best determine if students have a gap in phonemic awareness?

The best assessment to determine if students have a gap in phonemic awareness is segmenting sounds in four- and five-sound words. This task specifically evaluates a student's ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) within spoken words, which is the essence of phonemic awareness. By engaging students in segmenting sounds, educators can directly observe their understanding of how sounds combine to form words and identify any specific areas where they may struggle.

In contrast, reading grade-level texts aloud primarily assesses reading fluency and comprehension rather than phonemic awareness itself. A written spelling test focuses more on the application of spelling rules and orthographic patterns, which does not directly measure the students' phonemic awareness. Similarly, a reading fluency assessment evaluates how quickly and accurately a student can read a text but does not provide insights into their ability to manipulate and identify sounds in spoken language. Therefore, segmenting sounds provides the most targeted information about a student’s phonemic awareness.