First Sound Fluency (FSF) is a brief, direct measure of a student’s fluency in identifying the initial sounds in words. The ability to isolate the first sound in a word is an important phonemic awareness skill that is highly related to reading acquisition and reading achievement (Yopp, 1988). The ability to isolate and identify the first phoneme in a word is an easier skill than segmenting words or manipulating phonemes into words. Thus, FSF is used as a measure of developing phonemic awareness at the beginning and middle of kindergarten. 

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) is a brief, direct measure of phonemic awareness. PSF assesses the student’s fluency in segmenting a spoken word into its component parts or sound segments. Using standardized directions, the assessor says a word and asks the student to say the sounds in the word. The assessor underlines each correct sound segment of the word that the student says

Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) is a brief, direct measure of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics. It assesses knowledge of basic letter-sound correspondences and the ability to blend letter sounds into consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and vowel-consonant (VC) words. The test items used for NWF are phonetically regular make-believe (nonsense or pseudo) words. To successfully complete the NWF task, students must rely on their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences and how to blend sounds into whole words. 

Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) is a measure of advanced phonics and word attack skills, accurate and fluent reading of connected text, and reading comprehension. The ORF passages and procedures are based on the program of research and development of Curriculum-Based Measurement of reading by Stan Deno and colleagues at the University of Minnesota (Deno, 1989). Students are given an unfamiliar, grade-level passage of text and asked to read for 1 minute. Errors such as substitutions, omissions, and hesitations for more than 3 seconds are marked while listening to the student read aloud.

Maze is a standardized measure of reading comprehension. The purpose of a maze procedure is to measure the reasoning processes that constitute comprehension. Specifically, Maze assesses the student’s ability to construct meaning from text using word recognition skills, background information and prior knowledge, familiarity with linguistic properties such as syntax and morphology, and reasoning skills.