You Just Got Your Child's Reading Scores. Here's What They’re Really Telling You.
A guest post for Gabriele Nicolet's readers, from the team at Kids Up Reading Tutors
It's the first few weeks of school, you just got your child's beginning-of-year reading scores.
You scan it for one thing: the overall number.
Below benchmark? Your stomach drops. At or above benchmark? You breathe out and move on with your day.
Totally understandable. But that single overall score is actually the least useful part of the report.
Reading isn't one skill. It's several skills working together. Most of the assessments schools use this time of year, things like DIBELS, Acadience, MAP, i-Ready, STAR, or FAST ELA, are built from a handful of subtests that each measure something different. The overall score is just an average. Two kids can land on the exact same overall number for completely different reasons, and need completely different kinds of help.
So this year, before you file that report away, take five extra minutes and look at the subscores. Here's what to look for.
Are Their Phonological Skills Strong?
Phonological skills are your child's ability to play with the sounds inside words: breaking a word apart sound by sound, deleting or swapping one sound for another and then blending those sounds back together again.
This is foundational. It's the skill that lets a child sound out a brand-new word instead of guessing based on the first few letters, and it's just as important for spelling as it is for reading. A child with weak phonological skills often has a hard time learning phonics patterns, sounding words out as they’re reading them and breaking them apart as they’re writing them.
If this subscore is low, it's usually the first thing worth strengthening, because so much else depends on it. Our phonics page walks through how sounds and letters connect. A low score in this area doesn’t mean your child has dyslexia, but this post on signs of phonological dyslexia is a good next read if this subscore stood out to you.
Do They Have Strong Decoding Skills?
Decoding is the ability to sound out an unfamiliar word using letter patterns, rather than recognizing it because you've memorized it.
If a child's decoding subscore is weak, they're likely leaning heavily on memory to "read" words they've seen before. That can work for a surprisingly long time, especially with the short, repetitive, and heavily illustrated books used in the earliest grades. But memorizing whole words isn't an efficient way to learn to read, and it isn't a strategy that scales. Every new word has to be memorized individually, and as vocabulary grows into the thousands, that approach runs out of road.
Kids who are behind on decoding almost always benefit from direct, explicit instruction in how our reading and spelling system actually works. You can read more about that approach on our reading tutoring page, and if this sounds like an older student who's been quietly compensating for a while, this post on helping a teen who's falling behind in reading is worth a look.
Strong Comprehension, But Weak Decoding? Watch This One Closely.
Here's a profile that's easy to miss, because on the surface, everything looks fine.
Some kids post strong reading comprehension scores while their decoding scores are weak. How? They're often relying on excellent memory, a rich vocabulary, and a lot of background knowledge to fill in the gaps. They hear a story read aloud once and remember it. They use context clues and picture cues skillfully. They're smart, and they're working hard, just not on the actual mechanics of reading.
That's genuinely great. Those are real strengths, and they'll serve your child well for life.
But comprehension built on compensation has a shelf life. As texts get longer, less predictable, and less illustrated (right around third or fourth grade for many kids), those workarounds stop being enough, and comprehension can start to slide, sometimes suddenly. The fix isn't to abandon what's working. It's to also build strong decoding skills.
This combination (strong comprehension, weak decoding) is one of the more common profiles we see in bright kids with dyslexia, and it's exactly why we wrote about the difference between dyslexia and dysgraphia and how it can show up. If you want to understand more about what's underneath it, our dyslexia page is a good starting point. But again, this doesn’t mean your child has dyslexia - just that they are missing some foundational reading skills.
Weak Reading Comprehension Score?
If the reading comprehension score itself came back low, the answer usually isn't "read more" or "read slower." It's almost always downstream of another issue.
Comprehension depends on a child having enough mental bandwidth left over, after decoding, to actually think about meaning. If sounding out words takes so much effort that there's nothing left over for understanding, comprehension will suffer no matter how smart your child is. So a weak comprehension score usually points back to gaps in:
Decoding. If reading the words themselves is effortful, meaning gets lost.
Morphology. Understanding prefixes, suffixes, and root words helps kids figure out unfamiliar words and their meanings on the fly, which supports both vocabulary and comprehension.
Phonological skills. Often, the same underlying weakness that made decoding hard is still showing up here too.
Morphology in particular doesn't get talked about as much as phonics, but it matters a lot, especially for comprehension and spelling as texts get more complex. Our dysgraphia and spelling page covers how we teach it, and this post on why spelling and dysgraphia tutoring look different from generic tutoring goes deeper into how these pieces connect.
What To Do With This Information
Before you tuck that beginning-of-year report away, try this:
Look at the subscores, not just the overall score or percentile.
Ask your child's teacher which subtest measures phonological skills and which one measures decoding. The exact names may vary by assessment.
Notice the pattern. Strong across the board? Wonderful, keep going. Weak phonological skills? Weak decoding? Strong comprehension covering for weak decoding? Weak comprehension with other underlying weaknesses? Each pattern points to a different next step.
You don't need to become a reading specialist overnight. You just need to know which questions to ask, and this beginning-of-year score is a great moment to ask them.
If you'd like a closer look at your own child's skills, Kids Up Reading Tutors offers a free 30-minute call and demo, where we walk through exactly this kind of skill-by-skill picture. If you're local to the DC area, you can learn more on our DC, Maryland and Virginia pages. You can also browse our blog and library for more on phonological skills, decoding, and everything that goes into confident reading.
Here's to a great start to the school year, subscores and all!
About the Author
Daniela Feldhausen is the founder of Kids Up Reading Tutors. A former attorney with a master’s degree in special education, she has extensive training in Structured Literacy, the Science of Reading, and Orton-Gillingham–based instruction. Her team evaluates each student’s reading and spelling skills, creates an individualized Structured Literacy Plan, and provides the one-on-one tutoring needed to carry it out.