This article is in reference to the full diagnostic assessment that just assesses phonemic awareness.  Teachers sometimes use this assessment when they need to dig into students' auditory manipulation skills.  It only uses audio and does not require any reading by the student. However, students must understand the instructions in English.

Below are the three major sections of this assessment.  Within each there are different tasks tested.  For instance in EPA, students may be asked to identify rhyming words.  They will be given a set of items.  A 70% correct or greater is required to have mastery on any particular set.  This allows us to have greater confidence when you see that a student has mastery or non-mastery on any particular task.

Early Phonological Awareness
Grade level range:  0 to 1.5
Tasks:
- Count the number of words in a sentence read aloud
- Identify rhyming words read aloud
- Recognize the same sound in words read aloud

Phoneme Segmentation: 
Grade level range: 0.5 to 1.8
Tasks:
- Count and recognize sounds in words with 2 and 3 discrete sounds in them read aloud.
- Count and recognize sounds in words with 4 discrete sounds in them read aloud.
- Count and recognize sounds in words with 5 and 6 discrete sounds in them read aloud.

Phoneme Manipulation Auditory Analysis Tasks (MAAT):
Grade level range: 0.5 to 1.8
Tasks:
- Blend sounds and identify the words the sounds make after being blended.
- Identify words read aloud after sounds has been added to shorter words.
- Identify shorter words read aloud after sounds have been deleted from longer words.
- Identify words read aloud after sounds have been substituted within them.

On the full report, the % score for each section is percentage of correct responses.  

Overall,if students have a total percentage correct of about 65% or greater they have good phonemic awareness skills for grade 1 or greater.  A score of 33% or less is chance.  Thus, any student testing between a range of 0% to 40% should be considered as having tested low on this diagnostic assessment.

You will need to evaluate students close to the 66% threshold of mastery.  Can they understand English?  Are they able to follow instructions?  Did they take the assessment seriously?  Many factors can lead to a lower score.  The instructions are very important to this assessment since students are being asked to manipulate audio in different ways.  There is a practice question given for each task before the scored questions are given.