Mixed Deck — All CALT Topics Flashcards

A CALT is conducting a curriculum-based measurement (CBM) oral reading fluency probe with a 3rd grader suspected of dyslexia. The student reads 68 words correct per minute (WCPM) with 91% accuracy on a grade-level passage. According to Hasbrouck & Tindal (2017) norms, the 50th percentile for 3rd grade, mid-year is approximately 93 WCPM. The CALT should interpret this data as:

Answer: Borderline fluency that, combined with the accuracy rate, suggests the student is working in the frustration range and additional phonological and decoding data are needed before drawing conclusions.

91% accuracy falls at the border of instructional and frustration level (instructional is typically 95–98%, frustration is below 90–94% depending on the framework). A student scoring 68 WCPM on a frustration-level passage cannot yield valid fluency conclusions — the passage is too hard, inflating error rates and suppressing rate. The appropriate next step is to gather data across easier and harder passages to establish a true instructional level, then supplement with formal phonological processing and decoding measures. CBM fluency alone cannot diagnose dyslexia; it screens for risk and informs instructional planning.

A CALT is administering a think-aloud protocol with a 6th-grade student and notices that after reading a paragraph containing a logical inconsistency embedded between two sentences, the student continues reading without pausing, rereading, or commenting. When asked afterward, the student reports the passage 'made sense.' This behavior MOST precisely reflects a failure in which metacognitive process — and which intervention is MOST targeted?

Answer: Comprehension monitoring (error detection); intervention should include explicit instruction in self-questioning and fix-up strategies tied to detected breakdowns

The think-aloud reveals that the student is not monitoring for comprehension breakdowns — a metacognitive skill called comprehension monitoring or error detection. Skilled readers notice when meaning breaks down and deploy repair strategies (rereading, slowing down, seeking clarification). The student's post-hoc report that the passage 'made sense' confirms an absence of monitoring, not a working memory failure (which would manifest differently, e.g., forgetting earlier information) or a syntactic deficit. Targeted intervention involves teaching self-questioning routines ('Does this make sense? Is this consistent with what I read before?') paired with explicit fix-up strategy instruction.

During a nonsense word reading task, a student correctly reads 'vint' and 'strom' but consistently misreads multisyllabic nonsense words like 'tormastic.' This pattern MOST likely reflects a weakness in:

Answer: Syllabication strategies and decoding of multisyllabic words

Successfully decoding CVC and CCVC nonsense words but failing on multisyllabic items indicates difficulty applying syllabication and morphemic analysis strategies.

Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) probes for written expression typically measure:

Answer: Correct Word Sequences (CWS) produced in a writing sample

CBM writing probes commonly measure Correct Word Sequences (CWS)—pairs of adjacent correctly spelled and grammatically appropriate words—as a sensitive indicator of written language proficiency.

Which of the following BEST describes the role of 'audience awareness' in written composition?

Answer: Selecting appropriate vocabulary for a given reader's knowledge level

Audience awareness involves adapting word choice, tone, and assumed background knowledge to suit the intended reader.

A student scores at the 16th percentile on the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing-2 (CTOPP-2) Phonological Memory composite but at the 50th percentile on Phonological Awareness and Rapid Symbolic Naming composites. Which interpretation is most defensible when considering a dyslexia diagnosis?

Answer: The student's phonological memory deficit alone is insufficient to confirm dyslexia; the profile suggests working memory difficulties that may reflect a distinct processing disorder requiring further differential assessment.

Dyslexia is characterized by a phonological processing deficit, but the profile must be interpreted holistically. An isolated phonological memory weakness without corresponding phonological awareness or RAN deficits does not constitute the classic dyslexia profile. The CALT must consider whether this reflects a working memory issue, anxiety, or a co-occurring disorder rather than defaulting to a dyslexia label. Further differential assessment (e.g., working memory batteries, ruling out ADHD or auditory processing disorder) is warranted before confirming dyslexia.

During the phonogram review card drill, a student consistently confuses /b/ and /d/ across three consecutive sessions despite repeated correction. According to structured lesson plan design principles, the MOST appropriate immediate modification is to:

Answer: Introduce or reinforce a distinct keyword and story association for each phonogram before resuming the drill, ensuring one is fully stabilized before reintroducing the other

In structured OG-based lesson design, a persistent reversals error signals an insufficiently anchored visual-auditory association. The evidence-based remedy is to anchor each phonogram independently to a unique keyword/story before resuming mixed drill — not to remove or isolate the pair, which delays cumulative practice of other patterns. Reintroducing them together before one is stabilized perpetuates the confusion.

A CALT conducts an error analysis on a student's oral reading and notices consistent substitution of short vowel sounds (e.g., reading 'bit' as 'bet'). This pattern MOST likely reflects a deficit in:

Answer: Vowel discrimination and phoneme-grapheme correspondence for short vowels

Consistent short vowel substitution errors indicate a specific gap in the phoneme-grapheme correspondence knowledge for short vowel sounds.

Phonemic awareness is best described as:

Answer: The specific ability to identify and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words

Phonemic awareness is a specific subskill of phonological awareness focused exclusively on the phoneme in spoken language and does not involve print.

A student correctly identifies that 'cat,' 'cup,' and 'coat' begin with the same sound. This skill is BEST described as:

Answer: Alliteration awareness (initial phoneme identity)

Recognizing that multiple words share the same initial phoneme is the definition of alliteration awareness, a form of initial phoneme identity.

According to the Simple View of Writing (Berninger & Winn, 2006), which of the following most accurately describes the relationship between transcription skills and text generation in producing written composition?

Answer: Transcription and text generation are multiplicative; significant deficits in either component suppress overall composition quality

The Simple View of Writing models written composition as the product (not the sum) of transcription skills and text generation, with executive functions as moderators. A multiplicative relationship means that severe deficiency in either component — even with strength in the other — dramatically reduces overall output. This is why a student who is a strong thinker but a poor speller still produces poor written compositions.

A student in ALT is learning to read words with the suffix -tion. This is best categorized as instruction in:

Answer: Morphology

The suffix -tion is a morpheme, so teaching it falls under morphological instruction within the ALT curriculum.

A student reads 'phoneme' as /ˈfoʊnɛm/ with correct prosody and no hesitation but cannot segment it into individual phonemes when asked. Which decoding phenomenon best explains this dissociation?

Answer: Orthographic mapping has occurred for the word as a whole unit without full phonemic awareness integration

Orthographic mapping (Ehri's theory) allows words to be stored in long-term memory as mapped units — the student has bonded the written form to its pronunciation without having fully analyzed the phoneme sequence consciously. This is why fluent reading of a word can precede the ability to explicitly segment it, especially in students who learned the word as a whole before receiving structured phonemic awareness instruction.

When a therapist has a student say the sound /k/, trace the letter 'c' in sand, and look at the letter card simultaneously, which MSL principle is being demonstrated?

Answer: Simultaneous, Multisensory

This technique is the essence of the multisensory principle. It involves engaging the auditory (saying the sound), kinesthetic-tactile (tracing in sand), and visual (seeing the letter) pathways at the same time to create strong, redundant neural pathways for learning.

A student scores at the 60th percentile on phoneme segmentation fluency but at the 9th percentile on a phoneme deletion task requiring deletion of the initial phoneme from consonant-cluster words (e.g., 'play' → 'lay'). What does this discrepancy most likely indicate?

Answer: The student has adequate phoneme segmentation automaticity but a specific deficit in phonological manipulation tasks that require holding a modified phonological representation in working memory.

Phoneme segmentation fluency taps procedural, sequential segmentation with a time pressure component, while phoneme deletion—especially from consonant clusters—requires holding the original word representation, identifying the target phoneme, mentally removing it, and reconstructing the remaining sequence. This is a phonological manipulation task with high working-memory demands. Strong segmentation fluency alongside weak manipulation scores is a well-documented profile in students with dyslexia whose segmentation is becoming automatic but whose phonological working memory remains insufficient for complex manipulation. Averaging scores across qualitatively different constructs is clinically invalid.

Which of the following syllable types is defined as a syllable with a short vowel sound spelled with a single vowel letter followed by one or more consonants?

Answer: Closed syllable

A closed syllable ends in one or more consonants that 'close in' the vowel, producing a short vowel sound (e.g., 'cat,' 'nap,' 'script').

During decodable text reading, a CALT corrects a student's oral reading error immediately. This practice aligns with which principle of structured literacy?

Answer: Diagnostic teaching — correcting errors prevents the consolidation of incorrect phoneme-grapheme mappings

Immediate error correction in structured literacy prevents incorrect responses from being practiced and entrenched, a core diagnostic-prescriptive teaching principle.

In the sentence 'The squirrel ran up the tree with a nut,' which group of words is a prepositional phrase?

Answer: with a nut

A prepositional phrase begins with a preposition and ends with a noun or pronoun (the object of the preposition). In this sentence, 'up' is a preposition and 'tree' is its object, making 'up the tree' a prepositional phrase. 'With a nut' is another prepositional phrase.

The phonological deficit hypothesis in dyslexia research refers to:

Answer: A core weakness in processing the sound structure of spoken language

The phonological deficit hypothesis proposes that the core neural deficit in dyslexia involves difficulty processing the sound structure of language.

A CALT student consistently misspells words with the schwa vowel. Which instructional strategy is MOST appropriate?

Answer: Teach morphological spelling — connecting the schwa vowel to related words with a stressed form

Relating schwa-vowel spellings to morphologically related words where the vowel is stressed (e.g., 'compete → competition') is the most effective strategy for accurate schwa spelling.