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The authors used nationally based, random sample data from three different years (2009–2010, 2011–2012, and 2014–2015) for nearly 20,000 first‐grade students (n = 9,760, 3,657, and 3,121, respectively) to examine long‐reported inadequacies of a commonly used early literacy assessment tool, the Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (OSELA), chief among them the skewness and nonequal interval nature of the scores that are obtained on its six individual tasks. Such inadequacies prevented the individual task scores from being used for program evaluation, screening, and progress monitoring. To mitigate these OSELA limitations, the authors employed Rasch analysis to create a scale that can be used to track a student's literacy achievement based on the combination of OSELA task scores. Dimensionality analyses revealed that the OSELA measures one factor, which supported the decision to …