What is the PAST assessment? The Phonological Awareness Screening Test explained

The PAST, or Phonological Awareness Screening Test, is a free, individually administered measure of phonemic awareness developed by Dr. David A. Kilpatrick, a reading researcher and New York state certified school psychologist. A classroom teacher, reading specialist, speech-language pathologist, or school psychologist gives it one to one, out loud, in roughly three to eight minutes, and scores it by hand on a paper form. It is not an IQ test. The PAST samples one narrow oral language skill that supports word reading, while an IQ test estimates broad reasoning ability across several cognitive domains. The two often appear side by side in a literacy evaluation, where a cognitive measure describes general reasoning and the PAST describes whether a student can manipulate the sounds inside spoken words quickly and accurately. This article covers what the PAST measures, who administers it, how its levels and scoring work, and why it reports no standard scores.

Kilpatrick states in the test's instructions that the PAST assesses phonemic awareness and also "phonemic proficiency." "Phonemic awareness" is the ability to notice and manipulate the individual speech sounds, or "phonemes," in spoken words, such as hearing that removing the /s/ from sleep leaves leap. "Phonemic proficiency" is his term for automatic, unconscious access to those phonemes, which he describes as a critical skill for "orthographic mapping," the process by which written words get encoded into long-term memory for instant retrieval on sight.

That second construct explains the test's most distinctive feature. Most phonological awareness measures record only whether a student produced the correct answer. The PAST records accuracy and speed separately, on the reasoning that a student who deletes a sound correctly after four seconds of visible effort is in a different instructional position from one who does it without hesitating.

The emphasis on phoneme-level skill matches where the research points. In a meta-analytic review covering 235 studies and 995 effect sizes, Melby-Lervåg, Lyster and Hulme reported that phonemic awareness was the strongest correlate of individual differences in word reading, holding up after verbal short-term memory and rime awareness were controlled. They also found children with dyslexia showing a large phonemic awareness deficit relative to same-age peers, with a pooled effect size estimate of -1.37.

The PAST descends from the Auditory Analysis Test published by Rosner and Simon in the Journal of Learning Disabilities in 1971, revised by Dr. Philip J. McInnis as the Language Processing Assessment in 1981 and the Phonological Processing Test in 1999. Kilpatrick modified these in 2003, and the acronym acknowledges that lineage.

Four elements set his version apart from those predecessors, according to the instructions: a timing element that assesses phonemic proficiency, corrective feedback after every incorrect item, responses that are deliberately "orthographically inconsistent" with the prompts, and multiple alternate forms. That third feature blocks a student from succeeding on spelling knowledge alone, since deleting the /t/ from went yields when. The instructions also flag a naming collision: an unrelated instrument, the Phonological Awareness Skills Test, shares the same acronym.

The current version is the January 2024 revision, distributed as free PDFs from Kilpatrick's own site, thepasttest.com. Four files sit there: the test forms, the instructions, and two appendices excerpted from his book Equipped for Reading Success, which the instructions are adapted from. There is no kit and no order form. An optional paid digital portal that includes the forms is sold through the Equipped for Reading Success website, and the PDFs stay free.

• Four alternate forms: Forms A, B, C, and D carry parallel items at the same levels, so a teacher can reassess a few times a year without the student rehearsing the words.

• Sounds only, never letter names: the examiner says the sound a letter makes rather than its name, the one exception being the long vowels in the second part of Level J. Kilpatrick devotes an appendix to producing consonants in isolation without adding an "uh" to the end.

• No instructions and no practice items: the examiner opens with "we are going to play a little word game" and begins, since the first items are easy enough to serve as practice.

• A two-second count on every item: after saying an item, the examiner silently counts "one thousand one, one thousand two." A correct response inside that window is marked X for automatic, a correct but slower one is marked 1, and any incorrect response is marked 0 regardless of speed.

• Corrective feedback after every error: the form supplies standard wording for each level, and the examiner may never say where in the word the sound sits, since locating a sound is part of what the test measures.

Kilpatrick asks examiners to treat training as a prerequisite: read the instructions twice, read the appendix on pronouncing phonemes in isolation, and practice on colleagues and no-stakes students while seeking feedback from a school psychologist or speech pathologist. Administering the PAST incorrectly, he warns, invalidates the results.

Form A contains 52 items in lettered levels of increasing difficulty, and routing means no student receives them all. Syllable levels D1, D2, E2, and E3 carry three items each and ask for a syllable deletion, as in saying bookcase without book. Levels F and G move to the initial phoneme and onset-rime with five items each, deleting the /f/ from feet or changing the /g/ in guide to /r/. Levels H and I form the basic phoneme section, splitting initial blends and deleting final sounds. Levels J, K, L, and M make up the advanced phoneme section, reaching medial vowel substitutions and final consonant clusters in words such as ghost and craft.

Two rules keep the session short. Routing lets older or more skilled students skip ahead when they answer the first item at a syllable level automatically, with the skipped items scored as automatic. The discontinue rule stops the test when the combined correct score across two consecutive levels falls to three or fewer out of ten, and every item beyond that point scores zero. That rule looks only at correct responses, never at automatic ones.

Kilpatrick is explicit on this point. The instructions state that the PAST correlates powerfully with reading and is not a normed test. The form repeats the caution in a footnote, noting that the grade levels printed throughout are estimates from research and clinical experience rather than formalized norms, and a table of average classroom raw scores in the instructions carries a direct warning not to treat those figures as norms.

What the PAST yields is a pair of criterion-referenced results at each level: a correct score and an automatic score. Syllable levels pass when all three items are right, levels F through M when at least four of five are, and the same thresholds apply to the automatic score. Kilpatrick's interpretive rule is that only levels passed at the automatic level need no instructional attention, which turns the record form into an instructional map rather than a ranking.

This is the sharpest contrast with a norm-referenced instrument. A standardized phonological processing battery such as the CTOPP-2 is normed on a national sample, so a raw score converts into a standard score and a percentile rank, which is what an eligibility team usually needs. The PAST answers a question closer to the one a curriculum-based system such as Acadience Reading asks: which skills does this student have, and where should Monday's lesson start. Neither substitutes for the other, and neither diagnoses anything on its own. Identifying a reading disability is the work of qualified clinicians drawing on multiple sources of evidence.

An IQ test and a phonemic awareness screener answer questions that barely overlap. A cognitive battery samples reasoning across verbal, visual, memory, and speed domains and places a person on a population distribution. The PAST samples one skill against a developmental sequence.

The research literature is also clear that general ability does not explain reading difficulty well. Reviewing four decades of work on specific reading disability, Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling and Scanlon concluded that inadequate word identification, traceable in most cases to deficits in alphabetic coding, is the basic cause of difficulty in learning to read, and that phonological deficits are the probable cause of the disorder. They judged hypothesized deficits in general learning abilities to have weak validity as causal factors. A strong reasoning profile and weak phoneme manipulation can therefore coexist in the same child, a pattern covered in our article on how dyslexia interacts with IQ testing.

For adults curious about the cognitive side of that picture, the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test offers a different kind of measurement. The RIOT IQ test was developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne for adults aged 18 and over. It runs 15 subtests across six cognitive indices, covering verbal reasoning, fluid reasoning, spatial ability, working memory, processing speed, and reaction time, takes about 52 minutes, and reports scores on the familiar scale with a mean of 100 and a "standard deviation" of 15, meaning a measure of how spread out scores are. It says nothing about phoneme manipulation, and it does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation. You can take the RIOT IQ test for a normed picture of adult reasoning to set alongside what a literacy screener provides.

No. The PAST measures phonemic awareness and the speed of phoneme manipulation, one oral language skill related to word reading. An IQ test estimates broad reasoning across multiple domains and reports a standard score. The PAST reports no such score.

Yes. Kilpatrick distributes PDFs of all four forms, the instructions, and two appendices at no charge from thepasttest.com. A paid digital portal that includes the forms is sold separately through the Equipped for Reading Success website, and the free PDFs remain available there.

The instructions describe administration from kindergarten through adulthood, with separate routing procedures for kindergarten to late first grade and for second grade onward.

No. It reports a correct score and an automatic score at each level, plus the highest level passed under each criterion. Kilpatrick provides an approximate developmental table for context and states plainly that these are estimates rather than formalized norms.

The materials are publicly available, but Kilpatrick treats training as a requirement, including repeated readings of the instructions, practice with the two-second count, and feedback from a qualified evaluator. A screener of this kind starts a professional conversation rather than settling one.

1. Kilpatrick, D. A. (n.d.). The PAST: Download the PAST, instructions, and appendices. thepasttest.com

2. Kilpatrick, D. A. (2024). Instructions for the Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) (rev. January 2024). thepasttest.com

3. Kilpatrick, D. A. (2024). Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST), Forms A, B, C, and D (update of January 3, 2024). thepasttest.com

4. Equipped for Reading Success. (n.d.). About the author. equippedforreadingsuccess.com

5. Equipped for Reading Success. (n.d.). Equipped for Reading Success teacher portal. equippedforreadingsuccess.com

6. Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S.-A. H., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 322-352. doi.org

7. Vellutino, F. R., Fletcher, J. M., Snowling, M. J., & Scanlon, D. M. (2004). Specific reading disability (dyslexia): What have we learned in the past four decades? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 45(1), 2-40. doi.org

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