What is the PALS assessment? Virginia's early literacy screener explained

The PALS assessment, short for "Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening," is a criterion-referenced early reading screener developed at the University of Virginia by Marcia Invernizzi and colleagues. Teachers use it to check whether young children have the foundational literacy skills that predict later reading success, such as rhyme awareness, letter names and sounds, spelling, and word reading, and to decide who needs extra instruction. PALS is not an IQ test, and it is not a diagnostic instrument for dyslexia or any other disorder. It flags children who may need reading help; formal diagnosis belongs to qualified clinicians. PALS was Virginia's statewide screener from the late 1990s until the Commonwealth replaced it with the Virginia Language and Literacy Screening System (VALLSS) in the 2024-2025 school year. This article covers the PALS instruments, how the scores work, and how a literacy screener differs from a cognitive ability test.

Virginia began statewide screening for early reading difficulty in 1997 under a legislative program called the "Early Intervention Reading Initiative," or EIRI. According to the Virginia Department of Education, the EIRI was created by the 1997 Acts of Assembly to serve kindergarten or first-grade students, was expanded by the 2000 General Assembly to cover kindergarten through third grade, and from 2000 onward used PALS, supplied at no charge to school divisions through a contract with the University of Virginia, to identify the students who should receive reading intervention. The university's PALS office reported that 131 of Virginia's 132 school divisions adopted it, screening roughly 260,000 students a year.

In a 2004 paper in the Journal of Literacy Research, Invernizzi, Justice, Landrum, and Booker described PALS-K as a response to demand from educators and policymakers for a screening tool that was also useful for planning instruction, and reported that by fall 2003 more than 430,000 Virginia kindergartners had been screened with it. PALS also spread beyond Virginia: the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction reports that it was Wisconsin's required literacy screener from 2012-13 through 2015-16.

PALS is a family of related instruments rather than a single test. The descriptions below follow the University of Virginia's task summaries.

PALS-PreK was written for four-year-olds and, in the university's description, served to guide instruction rather than to screen formally: it was given in the fall of preschool to shape teaching and again in the spring to evaluate progress. Its tasks were name writing (scored on a developmental continuum from scribbles to a correctly written name), upper-case and lower-case alphabet recognition, letter sounds, beginning sound production, "print and word awareness" (the child points to text features while the teacher reads a familiar nursery rhyme from a book), rhyme awareness, and nursery rhyme awareness. In a 2010 study in the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, Townsend and Konold analyzed PALS-PreK data from 4,518 children and concluded that it measures alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness, and print concepts with about the same accuracy for boys and girls.

In Virginia this version has been retired. The Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program states that a new Pre-K Language and Literacy Screener launched in fall 2022 and replaced PALS-PreK, which "had not been updated in many years," adding language-based tasks to the code-based skills PALS-PreK covered.

PALS-K, the kindergarten screener, is administered by the classroom teacher through a mix of small-group and one-to-one tasks. Its core tasks are:

• Rhyme awareness: From a set of three pictures, the child picks the one that rhymes with a target picture, across ten items.

• Beginning sound awareness: From three pictures, the child picks the one that starts with the same sound as the target, across ten items.

• Alphabet knowledge: The child names the 26 lower-case letters.

• Letter sounds: The child produces the sounds of 23 upper-case letters plus three digraphs (letter pairs such as "sh" that stand for one sound).

• Spelling: The child spells five consonant-vowel-consonant words and receives credit for phonetically acceptable substitutions.

• Concept of word: The child shows whether they can track individual words in a memorized rhyme and identify words presented inside and outside the text.

An optional word recognition task is available for children who already read. According to the National Center on Intensive Intervention's screening tools chart, the rhyme and beginning-sound tasks are given to groups of five or fewer, children below expectation retake them individually, no task is timed, administration takes about 20 minutes per student, and teachers need less than an hour of training.

PALS 1-3 is a leveled instrument. Every student takes the "Entry Level" tasks: a spelling inventory scored by phonics feature and word recognition in isolation drawn from eight graded word lists. Students who meet the Entry Level benchmark are done. The rest continue to Level A, an oral reading passage on which the teacher records accuracy, rates phrasing and expression on a three-point fluency scale, times the reading to compute words per minute, and asks multiple-choice comprehension questions. Students still below criterion move to Level B (alphabet recognition and letter sounds) and then Level C (blending phonemes into words and matching a sound within a spoken word to its letter).

PALS Plus, announced by the commercial distributor in 2014, extended this same structure through grade eight with word lists, spelling tasks, and reading passages for the upper grades.

PALS is "criterion-referenced," meaning each child's performance is compared with a fixed standard of minimum competence rather than with a national sample of peers. Scores on the individual tasks are added into a "summed score," and that total is compared with a benchmark that changes from fall to spring. A child below the benchmark is expected to receive instruction beyond the regular classroom program; under Virginia's EIRI, state intervention funding was tied to the number of children below the PALS benchmark, each of whom was to receive 2.5 hours a week of additional instruction.

Three features separate this from an intelligence test. First, PALS publishes no norms. The National Center on Intensive Intervention's entry records "Are norms available? No," and states that the benchmarks were set from age- and grade-level performance together with expert review panels. Second, the result is a raw total against a cut point, not a standard score. There is no scale with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, and no way to convert a PALS score into an IQ. Third, the skills PALS measures are taught directly. A five-year-old who has never handled alphabet books may score below benchmark in the fall and above it in the spring after a few months of instruction, which is exactly what the tool is built to detect. Readers who want a broader, norm-referenced picture of a child's readiness concepts at school entry need a different kind of instrument, such as the Bracken School Readiness Assessment.

The word "diagnostic" in PALS materials also needs care. It means identifying which literacy skills a child has and has not yet acquired so the teacher can target instruction. It does not mean a clinical diagnosis of a reading disorder, which requires a comprehensive evaluation by a qualified professional.

Virginia's General Assembly passed the Virginia Literacy Act in 2022, and school divisions began implementing it in the 2024-2025 school year. As part of that shift the Commonwealth adopted a new screener, VALLSS, built by the same University of Virginia partnership that produced PALS. A July 2024 report from WHSV, a Virginia news station, put it plainly: the new system replaces the previous literacy screener in Virginia, known as PALS. Alexandria City Public Schools' timeline lists VALLSS for grades K-3 in 2024-25 and grades K-8 in 2025-26, and the university's Virginia Literacy Partnerships office now describes VALLSS as the state-provided screening tool for the EIRI, reporting each child's risk of reading difficulty in a high, moderate, or low band.

VALLSS keeps code-based tasks familiar from PALS, such as letter names, letter sounds, and beginning sounds, and adds language measures such as vocabulary and sentence-level grammar. The university's legacy PALS data portal was retired on June 30, 2025. A Virginia parent whose child was screened before fall 2024 will have PALS reports; one screened since will have VALLSS reports. The two are related but not interchangeable.

Schools outside Virginia mostly use other tools for the same job. DIBELS is a set of brief, timed fluency probes, whereas PALS tasks are untimed and lean more on spelling and concept of word. aimswebPlus is a commercial benchmarking system with national norms and percentile ranks, which PALS, as a criterion-referenced tool, does not provide. These instruments share the same limits: they estimate a narrow set of reading skills at one moment, and their results should guide instruction rather than label a child.

For adults who want a measure of reasoning ability rather than reading skill, an IQ test is the right instrument. The RIOT IQ test, the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne, is designed for adults 18 and over, takes about 52 minutes, and reports on the familiar mean-100, standard-deviation-15 scale across 15 subtests and six cognitive indices (verbal reasoning, fluid reasoning, spatial ability, working memory, processing speed, and reaction time). Like any online measure, it does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation. You can learn more at riotiq.com.

PALS stands for Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening. It was developed at the University of Virginia and provided to Virginia public schools through a partnership with the state Department of Education.

No. PALS measures taught literacy skills such as letter knowledge, spelling, and word reading against fixed benchmarks. It has no norms, produces no standard score, and cannot be converted into an IQ.

No. PALS identifies children who may need extra reading instruction and shows teachers which skills to target. Diagnosis of dyslexia or any other disorder requires a comprehensive evaluation by a qualified clinician.

The suite included PALS-PreK for four-year-olds, PALS-K for kindergarten, PALS 1-3 for grades one through three, and PALS Plus, which extended the same structure through grade eight.

Not as the state screener. Virginia replaced PALS with VALLSS for grades K-3 in the 2024-2025 school year under the Virginia Literacy Act, and PALS-PreK was replaced by a new Pre-K Language and Literacy Screener in fall 2022.

1. Invernizzi, M., Justice, L., Landrum, T. J., & Booker, K. (2004). Early literacy screening in kindergarten: Widespread implementation in Virginia. Journal of Literacy Research, 36(4), 479-500. doi.org

2. Townsend, M., & Konold, T. R. (2010). Measuring early literacy skills: A latent variable investigation of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening for Preschool. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 28(2), 115-128. doi.org

3. National Center on Intensive Intervention. (n.d.). Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS): PALS for Kindergarten. Academic screening tools chart. American Institutes for Research. charts.intensiveintervention.org

4. Virginia Literacy Partnerships, University of Virginia. (n.d.). PALS-K assessment.. literacy.virginia.edu

5. Virginia Literacy Partnerships, University of Virginia. (n.d.). PALS 1-3 assessment.. literacy.virginia.edu

6. Virginia Department of Education. (n.d.). Early Intervention Reading Initiative (EIRI).. doe.virginia.gov

7. Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program. (n.d.). Pre-K Language and Literacy Screener.. vkrponline.org

8. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. (n.d.). PALS early literacy screener.. dpi.wi.gov

9. Famet, M. (2024, July 18). New literacy changes in the Commonwealth in upcoming 2024-25 school year. WHSV. whsv.com

Hero photo: Antique wooden alphabet blocks. Photo by Auckland Museum Collections, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0 (cropped).