The current rules of the Colorado READ Act require a second data point within thirty days of the initial interim assessment.
Since PALS provides universal screening and diagnostic information within the initial fall window, the second data point should correspond to a student’s earliest skill deficit.
PALS Quick Checks allow teachers to quickly and easily gather these data. However, it is important to ensure that teachers select and use the set of Quick Checks best suited for measuring how well core instruction and intervention are meeting the student’s identified needs. For students ID’d as “at risk for developing a significant reading difficulty” by the PALS assessment, the best set of Quick Checks may correspond to data gathered through Level B and Level C tasks.
PALS recommends that students achieve complete mastery on these Quick Checks to qualify for exemption from literacy intervention through a READ Plan. We recommend that intervention(s) should continue for ID’d students until more data is gathered. Research suggests that successful interventions are typically about 30 weeks long (Florida Center for Reading Research, retrieved Sept. 18, 2013).