What is the TOPA-2+? The Test of Phonological Awareness explained

The TOPA-2+ is the Test of Phonological Awareness, Second Edition: PLUS, a norm-referenced measure of phonological awareness for children aged 5 through 8, published by PRO-ED in 2004 and written by Joseph K. Torgesen and Brian R. Bryant. It is usually given to a whole class at once, though it can also be administered one-on-one, by a teacher, school psychologist, speech-language pathologist, or educational diagnostician with the training the publisher requires. The TOPA-2+ is not an IQ test. It samples one narrow skill that predicts early reading progress: whether a child can hear individual speech sounds inside spoken words, and whether the child knows which letters map onto those sounds. In a full evaluation it works as an early screener alongside an intelligence battery rather than in place of one, flagging children who may need closer attention in reading. This article covers what it measures, how its two versions differ, how it is scored, who may give it, and how it relates to intelligence testing.

"Phonological awareness" is the ability to notice and work with the sound structure of spoken language, separately from its meaning. The TOPA-2+ targets the finest grain of that ability, sometimes called "phonemic awareness," which deals with individual speech sounds. According to PRO-ED, both versions of the test measure a young child's ability to isolate individual phonemes in spoken words and to understand the relationships between letters and phonemes in English.

That second skill distinguishes this edition from its predecessor. The publisher states that letter-sound knowledge was not assessed by the original Test of Phonological Awareness and "is the reason the PLUS was added to the title," calling the addition one that "adds substantially to the predictive accuracy of early screening for reading difficulties."

The National Reading Panel, convened by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, reported that phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are the two best school-entry predictors of how well children learn to read in their first two years of instruction. Its meta-analysis of 52 studies also found that phoneme instruction works best when children manipulate sounds using letters, which is close to what the TOPA-2+ samples.

A later review by Monica Melby-Lervåg, Solveig-Alma Lyster, and Charles Hulme in Psychological Bulletin pooled 235 studies and 995 effect sizes. Children with dyslexia scored about 1.37 standard deviations below same-age peers on phonemic awareness, a wider gap than those for rhyme awareness or verbal short-term memory, and phonemic awareness stayed the strongest correlate of word reading.

The TOPA-2+ ships as two tests in one kit. Both use paper booklets in which children mark answers to items the examiner reads aloud, and both pair a phonemic awareness section with a Letter-Sounds section.

• Kindergarten, Initial Sound-Same: ten items in which the child marks which of three words begins with the same sound as a target word.

• Kindergarten, Initial Sound-Different: ten items in which the child marks which of four words begins with a different first sound from the other three. The two item types are summed into one phonemic awareness score.

• Kindergarten, Letter-Sounds: fifteen items in which the child marks which of four letters corresponds to a phoneme the examiner says.

• Early Elementary, Ending Sound-Same and Ending Sound-Different: the same two formats built around final sounds rather than initial ones, ten items each, which the publisher describes as a harder task.

• Early Elementary, Letter-Sounds: the child spells simple pseudowords presented as the names of "funny animals." The words run from two to five phonemes, all single syllables.

PRO-ED notes that the kindergarten version can be given at any point in the kindergarten year, though it is likely to be most sensitive to individual differences in the second half. Testing runs 30 to 45 minutes for the kindergarten version and 15 to 30 minutes for the early elementary version, which is written for first and second grade.

The TOPA-2+ reports percentile ranks along with a choice of standard scores, including scale scores and Normal Curve Equivalents. PRO-ED explains that the examiner picks the metric to suit the purpose, since identification decisions and agency reporting call for different score types.

• Norm sample: the publisher reports that the test was standardized on 2,085 students from 26 states, 1,035 of them for the kindergarten version and 1,050 for the early elementary version. The sample matched the United States population across geographic region, gender, race, ethnicity, family income, and parents' educational attainment.

• Norming dates: all of the normative data were collected during 2002 and 2003, with sample characteristics keyed to projections from the 2000 census. Those norms are now more than twenty years old, the clearest limitation of the instrument and a reason to treat any percentile as approximate.

• Reliability: the manual provides internal consistency, test-retest, and interscorer reliability evidence, which the publisher states meets or exceeds .80 across all ages. Coefficients were also computed separately by sex, by racial and ethnic subgroup, and for students with language and learning disabilities.

• Validity and bias: the publisher reports content-descriptive, criterion-prediction, and construct-identification validity evidence, plus studies indicating the absence of culture, gender, race, and disability bias.

Reliability in the low .80s is respectable for a short group-administered screener. It sits below the .90-plus figures typical of full-scale IQ scores, so a single TOPA-2+ score carries a wider band of measurement error than parents often assume. The test was reviewed in the sixteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook from the Buros Center for Testing, the standard independent source for test appraisals.

PRO-ED classifies the TOPA-2+ at qualification "Level B" and still sells the complete kit, which holds an Examiner's Manual plus summary forms and student booklets for both versions. Under the publisher's stated policy, Level B purchases are restricted to people holding a master's degree in psychology, education, occupational therapy, social work, or counseling with formal training in the ethical administration and interpretation of assessments, or certification in a relevant professional body, or a license in a health-care field. PRO-ED ties that policy to the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing issued by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education.

The TOPA-2+ is one option among several for early-literacy screening. Fluency-based systems such as DIBELS are timed, given one-to-one, and repeated through the year to track growth. The TOPA-2+ instead offers an untimed, norm-referenced snapshot a teacher can collect from a whole class in one sitting. When a screening result raises questions, an evaluator typically moves to a deeper instrument such as the CTOPP-2, which PRO-ED administers individually across ages 4 through 24 in about 40 minutes and normed on 1,900 people in 2008 and 2009.

An IQ test estimates general cognitive ability by sampling widely across verbal reasoning, spatial ability, fluid reasoning, working memory, and processing speed, then combining the results into a full-scale score. The TOPA-2+ does none of that. It asks a child to listen for sounds and match them to letters, then reports how that performance compares with a national sample of the same age. A low score may reflect weak phonemic awareness or simply little exposure to print, and none of it speaks to general reasoning ability.

Federal regulation explains why the distinction matters in schools. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act regulations at 34 CFR 300.307, state criteria for identifying a specific learning disability must not require a severe discrepancy between intellectual ability and achievement, and must permit a process based on a child's response to research-based intervention. Early skill screening therefore carries weight in its own right, with no IQ score standing as gatekeeper. Readers can go deeper on whether dyslexia affects IQ scores.

Mainstream psychometrics would still expect some overlap, since almost every cognitive task correlates to some degree with the general factor of intelligence. The honest position is that the TOPA-2+ and an IQ battery answer different questions, and neither answer substitutes for the other.

The test yields no diagnosis. It measures two skills at one moment, with aging norms and reliability in the low .80s, and says nothing about comprehension, vocabulary, oral language, or the reasoning a child brings to a new problem. No decision about a learning disability or a placement should rest on a screening score alone; that judgment belongs to a qualified clinician or school team weighing several sources of evidence. Used sensibly, the result is still useful: a low score early in kindergarten is a signal to teach phoneme manipulation explicitly with letters.

Adults curious about the broader construct can measure it directly. The RIOT IQ test, the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test, was developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne for adults 18 and older. It includes 15 subtests across six cognitive indices (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. Like the TOPA-2+, it does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation. What it offers is a normed estimate of general reasoning ability that a single-skill reading screener was never built to provide. You can take it at RIOT IQ.

No. The TOPA-2+ measures phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge in children aged 5 through 8. It reports percentiles and standard scores for those two skills only, and does not estimate general cognitive ability.

PRO-ED lists the test for children aged 5 through 8 years. The kindergarten version is designed for the kindergarten year and takes 30 to 45 minutes; the early elementary version is for first and second grade and takes 15 to 30 minutes.

It refers to the Letter-Sounds subtests added in the second edition. PRO-ED states that the original Test of Phonological Awareness did not assess letter-phoneme relationships, and that adding them improves early screening accuracy.

PRO-ED reports that all normative data were collected in 2002 and 2003 and keyed to 2000 census projections. The test carries a 2004 copyright and no third edition has been released, so read scores with the age of the norms in mind.

PRO-ED sells it at qualification Level B, which covers school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, educational diagnosticians, and other professionals with graduate training in assessment.

1. PRO-ED. (n.d.). TOPA-2+: Test of Phonological Awareness–Second Edition: PLUS, Complete Kit [product page]. proedinc.com

2. PRO-ED. (n.d.). Qualifications policy.. proedinc.com

3. PRO-ED. (n.d.). CTOPP-2: Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing–Second Edition, Complete Kit [product page]. proedinc.com

4. Buros Center for Testing. (n.d.). Test of Phonological Awareness–Second Edition: PLUS [test review listing, The Sixteenth Mental Measurements Yearbook]. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. marketplace.unl.edu

5. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Findings and determinations by topic areas. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. nichd.nih.gov

6. Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S.-A., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138, 322-352. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

7. U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.). Sec. 300.307 Specific learning disabilities [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act regulations]. sites.ed.gov

Hero photo: Wooden alphabet blocks stacked in towers. Photo by Bobjgalindo, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped).