LETRS Unit 2 Practice Test 2025 – Complete Prep for Teachers

Employing Elkonin boxes is an effective way to measure phonemic awareness in students because this technique allows educators to visually represent the sounds in words. When students use Elkonin boxes, they push tokens or counters into boxes to indicate the individual sounds they hear in a given word. This hands-on activity helps demonstrate their ability to segment phonemes, which is a core component of phonemic awareness. Through this method, educators can directly observe a student’s understanding of sound segmentation, which is crucial for reading development.

The other options, while valuable in their own right, focus on different skills. Reading fluency tests assess a student's ability to read quickly and accurately, which does not directly measure phonemic awareness. Writing assessments evaluate writing skills, including spelling and composition, but they do not measure how well students can manipulate sounds in spoken words. Analyzing vocabulary depth examines the richness and complexity of a student's vocabulary knowledge rather than their understanding of phonemes. Thus, Elkonin boxes stand out as the best tool for specifically targeting and measuring phonemic awareness.