What assessment strategy best measures a student's mastery of the alphabetic principle?

The assessment strategy that effectively measures a student's mastery of the alphabetic principle is having them read aloud a list of phonetically regular nonsense words. This approach is particularly useful because it focuses on the student's ability to apply their understanding of the relationship between letters and sounds, which is central to the alphabetic principle.

When students read nonsense words, they cannot rely on memorized sight words; instead, they must decode the printed symbols based on their phonetic knowledge. This process not only reveals their ability to recognize letter-sound correspondences but also demonstrates their understanding of how to blend sounds together to form words, an essential skill in developing reading fluency.

While other strategies may provide insight into a student's literacy skills, they do not directly assess the application of the alphabetic principle to the same degree. For instance, writing their own stories or identifying sight words requires different cognitive skills that do not exclusively reflect understanding of sound-letter relationships. Listening to a teacher read aloud provides exposure to language but does not assess a student's independent decoding ability.