---
title: "7 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Screener for Literacy"
description: "So, there is important factors to consider when selecting the right screener to identify children in your school, classroom, or district, and I'm going to say a list here. So first of all, you want..."
url: https://yosekbaez60.ws/2026/03/05/7-factors-to-consider-when-choosing-a-screener-for-literacy/
date: 2026-03-05
modified: 2026-03-05
author: "yoselkbaez36ck"
categories: ["Gratitude"]
tags: ["Literacy", "Screener"]
type: post
lang: en
---

# 7 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Screener for Literacy

So, there is important factors to consider when selecting the right screener to identify children in your school, classroom, or district, and I’m going to say a list here. So first of all, you want to make sure that it assesses all important skills that we know are important for learning to read. Secondly, you want to make sure that the screener is evidence-based, that there is some research behind it, and it’s not just someone who puts some words together and said, “This is a great screener because it has worked last year in my classroom.” And what are the characteristics of the norming group? So, I’ll give you an example.

![](https://images.pexels.com/photos/7929273/pexels-photo-7929273.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&h=650&w=940)So, if you are in an urban school with many children, maybe lower-economic-status families, you want to make sure that this was represented when the screener was normed, meaning: were kids included from low SES families when they were norming the screener? You also want to make sure that the overall time that it takes for you to screen the children is works in your classroom, right? There are very short screeners; they are very long screeners, so you want to make sure that this works with your school and it works with your, what we call, a screening protocol. So, you could screen as a summer before kindergarten, which may give you a little bit more time because you get the kids in individually, or do you need to screen within the first week of kindergarten and you have very limited time? You want to look at sensitivity and specificity of a screener.

So, sensitivity is correctly identifying those who will develop a disability, and specificity is correctly identifying those who will not develop a reading disability. So, you can also call it the false positives and false negatives. So, false positives is a child is identified as being at risk but is not actually risk, which can be due to problems with the instrument, the day they were tested, and they were tired and didn’t have breakfast, etc. Then you have false negatives, which is a kid is actually at risk, but you are not detecting it with your instrument. So, as a district, we recommend that you catch all the kids who are at risk, so you would have no false negatives, but that could lead to more false positives.

And so, you can move these two bars and decide, based on the resources and the number of testers you have, etc., how you want to move the discrepancy between the false positives and the false negatives.

(https://www.adchiever.com/index.php?a=203126&pageid=NQ==)

[![](https://d1yei2z3i6k35z.cloudfront.net/9756027/690209042d09f_AAAGraphics2.png)](https://warriorplus.com/o2/a/f83gr7c/0)

[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fyosekbaez60.ws%2F2026%2F03%2F05%2F7-factors-to-consider-when-choosing-a-screener-for-literacy%2F&linkname=7%20Factors%20to%20Consider%20When%20Choosing%20a%20Screener%20for%20Literacy)[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/mastodon?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fyosekbaez60.ws%2F2026%2F03%2F05%2F7-factors-to-consider-when-choosing-a-screener-for-literacy%2F&linkname=7%20Factors%20to%20Consider%20When%20Choosing%20a%20Screener%20for%20Literacy)[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fyosekbaez60.ws%2F2026%2F03%2F05%2F7-factors-to-consider-when-choosing-a-screener-for-literacy%2F&linkname=7%20Factors%20to%20Consider%20When%20Choosing%20a%20Screener%20for%20Literacy)[](https://www.addtoany.com/share)