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Blog Post: Literacy Program Evaluation Guide

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Blog Post: Literacy Program Evaluation Guide

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As someone who will be in charge of remedial reading programming, this evaluation guide from Reading Rockets could be especially useful. While we currently have programming in place, we know that programs and needs change and having this resource to refer back to when deciding on new programs for our school will be essential.

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If you are planning to purchase a literacy program for instruction, get as much information as you can about a program’s benefits and effectiveness. This article provides basic comparative information about a range of commercially available literacy programs.

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This course module is part of the series from Reading Rockets titled Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing. Included in the Assessment module is an introduction, a detailed overview of the different kinds of assessments, a review of the different reading profiles, and examples of assessments in each of the foundational reading areas. Also included is a pretest, many articles and videos, and a post-test to evaluate learning throughout the module.

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Assessments can be invaluable in helping us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each student and to guide the next steps in instruction. There are many informal tools for assessing the various components of reading. No single assessment will provide insight into all of the reading-related skills that students need to learn.

Letter of completion

After completing this module and successfully answering the post-test questions, you'll be able to download a Letter of Completion.

Conducting informal assessments throughout the school year can help us determine:

Whether instruction is being delivered at the right level and at the right pace

How to plan future instruction that will meet students' needs

How students should be grouped for instruction so that each student receives instruction at the right level of difficulty

Which students need individual support

The "In Depth" section of this module looks at the reading-related skills that students should master by the end of Grades K, 1, 2, and 3. That section also provides an overview of how educators can monitor student progress and determine whether a student is staying on track. The "In Practice" section presents more detailed information about the informal assessment tools that can be used to measure each of the core skills that students need to become proficient readers.

Most of the assessments we feature should be administered one on one. Reading assessments in the early grades involve listening as the student reads aloud or responds verbally. Group-administered assessments of students' silent reading tend to miss many key components of reading. When you are giving an assessment, you should try to provide a comfortable, non-distracting testing environment for the student, with the rest of the class engaged in another task and working quietly. Ideally, you can arrange for another teacher to be present while you are conducting assessments.

For detailed information on specific assessment tools, visit the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL). SEDL offers a database that provides extensive information about many early reading assessment tools. It's a valuable resource for teachers and administrators who are seeking reliable reading assessment tools for children in pre-K through third grade.

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Assessments can be invaluable in helping us to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each student and to guide the next steps in instruction. There are many informal tools for assessing the various components of reading. No single assessment will provide insight into all of the reading-related skills that students need to learn.

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Blog Post: How to Analyze or Assess Reading Comprehension

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Blog Post: How to Analyze or Assess Reading Comprehension

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In this blog post, literacy expert Dr. Timothy Shanahan addresses a teacher question specific to reading comprehension assessment. He refers to the fact that unlike many other elements of reading, comprehension is often not repeatable as it is highly dependent on the text and its factors. He makes recommendations to evaluate a student's comprehension abilities by keeping track across various text types and complexities.

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Teacher question: Shanahan's response: I've attached a Student Work Analysis tool that we are using. I have read that you oppose attempts to grade students on the individual reading standards. Although this tool is not used for grading students, it is a standard-by-standard analysis of the students' work, and I wonder what you think of it? [The form that was included provided spaces for teachers to analyze student success with each of their state's math standards].
In the blog entry that you refer to, I spoke specifically about evaluating reading comprehension standards (not math or even the more foundational or skills-oriented decoding, vocabulary, or morphology).

A common error in reading education is to treat reading comprehension as if it were a skill or a collection of discrete skills.

Skills tend to be highly repeatable things...

Many of the items listed as comprehension skills are not particularly repeatable. All these standards or question types aimed at main idea, central message, key details, supporting details, inferencing, application, tone, comparison, purpose, etc. are fine, but none is repeatable in real reading situations.

Each of these actions is unique or at least high particularized. Each time these instances occur they are in completely different contexts. To execute them, it requires different steps from instance to instance.

Not only does each text have its own main ideas, but because the expression of each text is so different, what it takes to locate, identify, or construct a main idea will vary greatly from text to text. Contrast this with forming the appropriate phoneme for /sh/ or /ph/, computing the product of 3 X 3, or defining photosynthesis.

Another problem is that these supposed comprehension skills aren't individually measurable.

My point isn't that teachers can't ask questions that would require students to figure out particular things about a text - of course they can - but performance on such questions is startlingly unreliable. Today, Johnny might answer the tone question like a champ, but tomorrow he won't - since that is a different story, and the author revealed tone in a totally different way.

Also, comprehension questions asked about a particular text aren't independent of each other (and item independence is imperative in assessment). The reason, little Johnny struggled with tone on the day after wasn't because he forgot what he knew about tone, nor even because tone was handled more subtly in text two... but because his reading was deeply affected by that text's more challenging vocabulary, complex sentences, or complicated time sequence - none of which are specifically tone issues.

That means that when teachers try to suss out how well Johnny can meet Standard 6 by asking tone questions, his answers will reveal how well he could make sense of tone in one particular text, but it won't likely be indicative of how well he'll handle tone on any other. (Not at all what one would expect to see with math, decoding, or vocabulary assessments).

Reading comprehension is so affected by the readers' prior knowledge of the subject matter being read about and the language used to express those ideas (e.g., vocabulary, sentence structure, cohesion, text organization, literary devices, graphics), that focusing one's attention on which kinds of question the kids could answer is a fool's errand.

If I were trying to assess reading comprehension information to determine who might need more help, the kind of help to provide, or who I should worry about concerning the end of year testing, then I wouldn't hesitate to ask questions that seemed to reflect the standards... but the information I'd use for assessment would ignore how well the kids could answer particular types of questions.

My interest would be in how well students did with particular types of texts.

Keep track of their overall comprehension with different types of text. I'd record the following information:

1. How the student did on each overall text (the percentage of questions answered correctly, or an estimate of the percentage of key information the student could include in a summary).

2. The topics of the texts (with, perhaps, some rating of each child's familiarity with those topics).

3. An estimate of the text difficulty (in terms of Lexiles or another readability estimate).

4. The lengths of the texts (in numbers of words, preferably).

5. Whether the text was Literary (narrative or poetry), or Informational (expository or argumentative).

Thus, a student record may look something like this:

Over time, you'll get some sense that junior does great with texts that are lower than 500L, but not so well with texts that are harder than 550L (unless they're about robots).

Or, perhaps over the report card marking period you may notice a difference in performance on the the literary or informational texts (which you can see in my example above). But you also need to notice that the informational texts were relatively harder here, so it isn't certain that the student would struggle more with content than literature (though one might make an effort to sort this out to see if there is a consistent pattern). Likewise the student seemed to be able to handle silent reading demands with the shorter texts, but comprehension tended to fall off with the longer texts. That may lead me to try to do more to build stamina with this student.

And so on.

Basically, the information that you are collecting should describe how well the student does with particular types of texts (in terms of discourse types, length, topic familiarity, and difficulty), rather than trying to figure out which comprehension skills the individual question responses may reveal.

If a student does well with many of the passages, then he or she will likely do well with the comprehension standards - as long as these weekly dipsticks are reflective of the difficulty, lengths, and types of texts that will appear on the end-of-year tests.

And, If students perform poorly with many of the passages, then their performance on all question types will be affected.

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How to Analyze or Assess Reading Comprehension

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Teacher question: Shanahan's response: I've attached a Student Work Analysis tool that we are using. I have read that you oppose attempts to grade students on the individual reading standards. Although this tool is not used for grading students, it is a standard-by-standard analysis of the students' work, and I wonder what you think of it?

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This article from Reading Rockets addresses the importance of teaching comprehension from an early age. It offers nine tips to help engage students in comprehension, strategies that can be used to improve those skills, and what parents specifically can do to actively support the process.

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In the last few years, an alarm has sounded throughout the nation's middle and high schools: too many students cannot read well. It isn't that they don't know their ABCs or how to read words. It's that they cannot understand or explain what they're reading. Johnny can read, but he doesn't understand.

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Blog Post: Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension

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Blog Post: Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension

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Joan Sedita's blog post references a number of resources including an article published in The Atlantic on the lack of reading improvement over the past 20 years and various experts' reactions to that article. She, and experts Willingham and Shanahan, posit that background knowledge and vocabulary is critical to truly achieving reading comprehension, as writers leave out many of the basic details, assuming that the reader already understands. This article reinforces the idea that in order to assist students in reading comprehension, educators must first ensure that background knowledge and vocabulary needs are met.

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A recent article "Why American Students Haven't Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years" in The Atlantic addressed the critical role that background knowledge plays in the ability to comprehend. The article subtitle was "Schools usually focus on teaching comprehension skills instead of general knowledge - even though education researchers know better."

The piece suggests that educators have treated comprehension as a set of skills, when in fact comprehension depends primarily on what readers already know. The article refers to a panel of literacy experts convened by officials who oversee the National Assessment of Educational Progress. As a member of the panel, Daniel Willingham, explained:

"Whether or not readers understand a text depends far more on how much background knowledge and vocabulary they have relating to the topic than on how much they've practiced comprehension skills. That's because writers leave out a lot of information that they assume readers will know. If they put all the information in, their writing would be tedious. But if readers can't supply the missing information, they will have a hard time making sense of the text."

Willingham and like-minded literacy experts posit that the best way to boost students' reading comprehension is to expand their knowledge and vocabulary by teaching them history, science, literature, and the arts, using curricula that guide kids through a logical sequence from one year to the next. Willingham has been making this point for a long time. I first read a piece he wrote about this in 2006 " How Knowledge Helps" around the same time I read E.D. Hirsch's book "The Knowledge Deficit", in which Hirsch claims that the solution to improving reading comprehension is to teach a core set of content topics over the grades.

In another 2006 Willingham article, "The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies", Willingham made the case that, even though decades of research shows that teaching reading comprehension strategies is effective, he considered them a "bag of tricks that can indirectly improve comprehension" and called for less explicit instruction of comprehension strategies. He wrote a later article in 2014 "Can Reading Comprehension Be Taught?" that begins with this:

"In this commentary, we suggest that reading comprehension strategy instruction does not actually improve general-purpose comprehension skills. Rather, this strategy represents a bag of tricks that are useful and worth teaching, but are quickly learned and require minimal practice."

Having spent many years successfully teaching comprehension strategies, especially to struggling readers, Willingham's 2006 piece took me aback. Since then, I have gained a better understanding of the complex factors that contribute to reading comprehension and have a greater appreciation for the role that background knowledge plays. However, I still believe that teaching general knowledge is not THE solution to reading comprehension deficits as Willingham and The Atlantic article claim.

Part of the issue has to do with how much inference is typically required during reading. As Willingham notes, writers leave out a lot of information that they assume readers will know. Here are some examples (from Oakhill and Cain, 2016):
Example 1: Bobby was busy with his bucket and spade. The sandcastle was nearly complete. Then a huge wave crashed onto the shore. On seeing that his day's work has been ruined Bobby started to cry.

Inference: Bobby was making a sandcastle.

Background knowledge needed: a bucket and spade is used to make things out of sand at the beach

Inference: The sandcastle was ruined by the wave

Background knowledge needed: incoming tides cause waves to come onto the beach and flatten sand sculptures

Example 2: Johnny carried a jug of water. He tripped on a step. Mom gave him a mop.

Inference: Johnny spilled the water when he tripped.

Background knowledge needed: experience with spills and the mess they make

These are very simple examples, but they show why reading comprehension is a dynamic interaction between the reader and the text. It is a process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning and most texts cannot be understood without contributions from readers, including background and "world" knowledge.

Clearly, readers must have sufficient background knowledge in order to construct meaning through inferences, especially when reading academic, subject area text. But they ALSO need a set of meta-cognitive strategies to process and organize the information they are reading. That's where explicit instruction of strategies comes in.

Tim Shanahan referenced The Atlantic article in a recent blog post although his position about the importance of background knowledge was more measured:

"Research has long shown the importance of knowledge in comprehension. If a reader knows much about a topic, his/her reading comprehension rises. Studies of what American kids (and adults) know about science, geography, economics, technology, and history suggest that Professor Willingham has a point. Our kids simply don't know enough. (There are great inequities in knowledge distribution, just as there is great inequality in reading attainment.)"

Shanahan points out that, in addition to devoting a significant amount of time to reading and writing instruction, it is important to provide time for reading about content to build background knowledge.

Based on experience, I think the kind of "workbook" activities that were commonly used in the 1970's through the 1990's to teach discreet comprehension "skills" (such as choosing the correct answer from four options for the main idea or a conclusion drawn) were not effective. Students did not apply these skills that they were practicing in isolation to real reading. That's why a long time ago I focused on training content teachers of all subjects to embed strategy instruction and guided practice into content learning using real content reading (see The Key Comprehension Routine). Time and again I have seen very successful results, which is why I can't accept Willingham's conclusion that background knowledge is the main solution and comprehension strategy instruction should be minimal.

Reference:

Oakhill, J. & Cain, K. (2016). Supporting reading comprehension development: From research to practice. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 42 (2).

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Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension - Keys to Literacy

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A recent article "Why American Students Haven't Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years" in The Atlantic addressed the critical role that background knowledge plays in the ability to comprehend. The article subtitle was "Schools usually focus on teaching comprehension skills instead of general knowledge - even though education researchers know better."

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Blog Post: Using Morphology to Teach Vocabulary

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Blog Post: Using Morphology to Teach Vocabulary

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Joan Sedita's blog post discusses the importance of teaching vocabulary through word parts (prefixes, suffixes, and root words). This blog posts addresses the need for that instruction and offers various strategies for teaching morphology in the classroom through activities aligned with the Keys to Vocabulary program.

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A recent blog post by Tim Shanahan titled "What should morphology instruction look like?" reminded me how important it is to teach students about word parts (i.e., roots, prefixes, suffixes) as a useful tool for determining the meaning of unfamiliar words and growing academic vocabularies.

One of the five components of our Key Vocabulary Routine is Teach Word Learning Strategies, which includes how to look for clues outside the word (use of context) and inside the word (use of word parts) when encountering an unknown word while reading. Outside clues include rereading the sentences before and after the word and using the context of the text. Inside clues come from recognizing meaningful parts of the word, i.e., using morphological knowledge.
Morphemes and Morphological Awareness
Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language. The dictionary defines a morpheme as "a word or part of a word that has a meaning and that contains no smaller part that has a meaning." Morphemes include base words and roots, prefixes, and suffixes. They can be combined in different ways to express particular meaning or to fill grammatical roles. Some morphemes are free - they can stand alone (e.g., cat, walk, govern). Other morphemes are bound - they cannot stand alone and must be attached to another morpheme (e.g., re-, un-, geo, phon, -ed, -ment). Here are some examples:

The word cat contains one free morpheme

The word cats contains one free morpheme (cat) and one bound morphemes (s)

The compound word sandbox contains two free morphemes (sand, box)

The word unfit contains one bound morpheme (un) and one free morpheme (fit)

The word transportable contains three bound morphemes (trans, port, able)

Morphology means the study of word parts, and morphological awareness refers to the ability to recognize the presence of morphemes in words. Research suggests that students can be taught various morphemic elements as a way to determine the meaning of new words (Edwards et al., 2004). Carlisle (2010) analyzed 16 studies about the relation of morphological awareness instruction to key components of literacy development. The findings showed that instruction about word parts was associated with improvements in word reading and spelling, and in determining the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Academic, School Morphemes
Academic vocabulary that must be learned beyond grade three often consists of words that combine a root, prefix, and suffix (e.g., poly + nom + ial = polynomial; manu + script = manuscript). In the upper elementary grades and higher, there are many opportunities to find words in content reading that contain Greek and Latin morphemes. Children in primary grades can begin to learn how morphemes combine by adding common prefixes and suffixes to short Anglo-Saxon words and also compounding them. For example:

jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, jumper

read, reread, reader, nonreader, reading

sunshine, schoolhouse, upstream

There are some limitations to morphemic analysis. Although it is useful, teachers must also make students aware that it doesn't always work. This is because some prefixes are not consistent in meaning (e.g., in- means both not and in). It is also because the meaning of many Greek and Latin roots have changed substantially over hundreds of years, so they no longer lend themselves to literal translation. For example, the literal translation of circumspect should be look around ( circum means around, spect means look), while the real meaning is to be cautious, careful.
Introducing Morphology
One way to introduce word analysis skills is to teach students how words are made up of word parts, and how words can be related in word families, such as the word family below for the Latin root port (to carry).

Keys to Literacy trainers often see examples of teachers using word families when we visit classrooms. Here are some examples:

Another instructional strategy is to have students build word families by providing a main root and then prefixes and suffixes that can be combined with the root to generate words. Word Matrix boxes such as the examples below can be used for this purpose. For more examples, visit Peter Bowers' website
convoy, envoy, convoys, envoys, convoying, convoyed, voyage, voyages, voyaging, voyaged, voyager, voyagers retake, retakes, retaken, retaking, untaken, mistake, mistakes, mistakable, mistakably, mistaken, mistakenly, mistaking, intake, intakes, overtake, overtakes, overtaken, overtaking, undertake, undertakes, undertaker, undertaken, undertaking, undertakings, uptake, uptakes, breathtaking, caretaker, caretaking, takes, taker, taken, taking, takeaway, takeover Teaching Morphology
Here are two additional suggestions from our Key Vocabulary Routine professional development program:

Find opportunistic moments: Often, unplanned moments come up during content instruction to provide examples of word analysis. Words from content vocabulary lists may include common word parts, or an opportunity to make a connection between the root of a new word and a word previously covered in class may arise. Content teachers in particular are in a position to point out examples of words that contain roots, prefixes, and suffixes from content reading material.

School-wide focus: Most of the general academic words that students need to learn are derived words with word parts. A school-wide approach to teaching academic vocabulary involves teachers from different grades and subjects agreeing to focus on a few root words and their associated word families each week or two.

A 2015 piece posted by the Institute for Multi-Sensory Education's blog suggests these strategies for teaching morphology in the classroom based on research by Dr. Nonie Lesaux:

1. Morphology should be taught as a distinct component of a vocabulary improvement program throughout the upper elementary years.

2. Morphology should be taught as a cognitive strategy to be learned. In order to break a word down into morphemes, students must complete the following four steps:

Recognize that they don't know the word.

Analyze the word for recognizable morphemes, both in the roots and suffixes.

Think of a possible meaning based upon the parts of the word.

Check the meaning of the word against the context.

Students also need to understand the use of prefixes, suffixes, and roots, and how words get transformed.
Lists of Roots, Prefixes, Suffixes
There is a significant body of research indicating that instruction of prefixes is beneficial, and many vocabulary researchers recommend instruction of the most common prefixes as the first and best component of word analysis (Graves, 2004; Carlisle, 2007). White, Sowell, and Yanagihara (1989) found that 20 prefixes account for almost 97% of the 2,959 prefixed words that most frequently appear in school reading materials. Given how often these 20 prefixes occur, it makes sense to teach their meaning and use. To access a free list of these prefixes, visit the Keys to Literacy free resources page at our website, and go to the Vocabulary section. You will also find free lists of the following:

Common Numerical Prefixes

Common and Useful Suffixes

Common Greek and Latin Roots

References:
Carlisle, J.F. (2010). Effects of instruction on morphological awareness on literacy achievement: An integrative review. Reading Research Quarterly, 45 (4) 464-487.

Carlisle, J.F. (2007). Fostering morphological processing, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension. In R.K. Wagner, A.E., Muse, & K.R. Tannenbaum (Eds.). Vocabulary acquisition: Implications for reading comprehension. New York: Guilford Press.

Edwards, C.E., Font, G., Baumann, J.F., & Boland, E. (2004). Unlocking word meanings: Strategies and guidelines for teaching morphemic and contextual analysis. In James, R. Baumann & Edward J. Kame/ennui (Eds.). Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice. New York: Guilford Press.

Graves, M.F. (2004). Teaching prefixes: As good as it gets? In James, R. Baumann & Edward J. Kame/ennui (Eds.). Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice. New York: Guilford Press.

White, T.G., Sowell, J., & Yanagihara, A. (1989). Teaching elementary students to use word-part clues. The Reading Teacher, 42.

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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Using Morphology to Teach Vocabulary - Keys to Literacy

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Suggestions for teaching vocabulary by analyzing word parts.

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Blog Post: Previewing Vocabulary Before Reading

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Blog Post: Previewing Vocabulary Before Reading

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In this blog post, Joan Sedita discusses the significance of previewing unknown vocabulary in a text before reading. She references the need for students to possess solid background knowledge (also discussed in a blog post under the Comprehension section), and previewing unknown or confusing vocabulary is one way to achieve that. She offers strategies such as the Word Knowledge Checklist as a possible previewing activity.

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Existing background knowledge is a critical component for comprehension, and word meanings are part of larger knowledge structures about a topic. Knowing the vocabulary words associated with a given topic enables students to connect their background knowledge to what they are reading. What if students aren't unfamiliar with some of the vocabulary in the text? Many studies have shown that previewing unfamiliar words before students read improves comprehension.

The goals for previewing vocabulary include activating prior knowledge, clearing up student misconceptions about word meaning, and clarifying the meaning of known words in relation to the current context (especially for words with multiple meanings). The most important goal is to provide some familiarity with unknown words so students can make sense of the text when they read.

There may be many words or phrases that are unfamiliar to students, but it is not worth spending time teaching all these words. Previewing is about attaching some meaning to new words rather than deeply learning these words. It is important to provide deep, direct instruction for certain key words, but previewing before reading is not the best time to do this. Previewing should provide students with just enough knowledge about those words that are central to the meaning of what they will read. Graves (2006) says it this way:

"In one case you may just want to introduce the word so the students won't stumble over it when they see it in an upcoming passage. In another, you will want to give students deep, rich and lasting meaning for a word."

The point is to not spend a significant amount of time pre-teaching all of the words that may be unfamiliar to students.
What words should be previewed?
Choosing words to preview will depend on the students' grade levels, vocabulary and background knowledge, and English proficiency. Teachers should use their common sense and knowledge of their students to choose words and not rely on textbooks to identify words for previewing. Here are some suggestions:

Choose words that are necessary to understand the text.

Choose words that are essential to understanding the major concepts in the content lesson or unit of study.

Choose words that are unfamiliar, specialized, academic words (e.g.k metamorphosis, quadrilateral, oligarchy) and non-specialized academic words (e.g., analyze, relationship, synthesize).

Choose words that are unfamiliar to most of the students.

Choose words that have unfamiliar multiple meanings and problematic phrases or figures of speech.

Student Rating of Word Knowledge
The growth of word knowledge is slow and incremental, requiring multiple exposures to words. Often students may not know the full meaning of a word or be able to produce a definition, yet they may still have enough familiarity with a word to be able to comprehend while reading.

A word knowledge checklist is a good way to preview words and have students rate their knowledge of words as a preview activity. Wesche and Paribakht (1996) developed The Vocabulary Knowledge Scale that provides five levels of word knowledge:

I don't remember having seen this word before.

I have seen this word before, but I don't think I know what it means.

I have seen this word before, and I think it means _____.

I know this word. It means _____.

I can use this word in a sentence: __________.

Blachowicz (1986) developed a checklist that provides a choice of three levels of word knowledge, and Beck, McKeown, and Kucan (2002) developed one with four levels. See the examples below.

For more suggestions about previewing vocabulary, see Chapter 3 in our teacher training book The Key Vocabulary Routine.

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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Previewing Vocabulary Before Reading - Keys to Literacy

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Existing background knowledge is a critical component for comprehension, and word meanings are part of larger knowledge structures about a topic. Knowing the vocabulary words associated with a given topic enables students to connect their background knowledge to what they are reading. What if students aren't unfamiliar with some of the vocabulary in the text?

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Website: Science of Reading - What I Should Have Learned in College

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Website: Science of Reading - What I Should Have Learned in College

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This Facebook group is a community of educators dedicated to the Science of Reading. This group is a place to find resources, ask questions, and gain a better understanding of the Science of Reading. It has provided a wealth of information for me so far and I will continue to refer back to it as I move forward.

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Log into Facebook to start sharing and connecting with your friends, family, and people you know.

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Blog Post: Reading Intervention for Older Struggling Students

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Blog Post: Reading Intervention for Older Struggling Students

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The blog post from Joan Sedita offers information related specifically to remediation or literacy intervention for older students. As a Reading and Writing Specialist in a grade 6-8 school, this post served as a helpful reminder of what is most beneficial and important for older students and what interventions are needed to help students grow and develop their reading skills.

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In the last few months I have seen a growing interest in adolescent literacy. This includes content literacy instruction for all students that is integrated across subject areas, as well as intervention instruction for older students who struggle with reading and writing. Between 2005 and 2015, a number of adolescent literacy research reports were published based on meta-analyses of research on effective practices for teaching reading and writing to older students, and the website was also launched (see the reference list). The visual below is a slide from a recent workshop I delivered about this topic. At that time schools and districts began addressing the literacy needs of older students, but over the past few years, literacy initiatives shifted focus primarily on the needs of PreK to grade 3 students. While this focus is essential, even if students leave grade 3 with grade-level reading and writing skills there is no guarantee that their skills will continue to grow to meet the demands of upper grades. Also, consider that the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress reading scores were down from the 2017 assessment, with only 35% of 4th graders and 34% of 8th graders scoring at or above proficient.

If you are an educator who works with older students, the good news is that the focus is beginning to shift to grades 4-12. A number of state departments of education (e.g., Colorado, Ohio, Arkansas, Massachusetts) are offering professional development and grant funding to grade bands beyond the elementary level. And from personal experience, the number of inquiries for professional development about adolescent literacy coming in to Keys to Literacy is significantly growing. Keys to Literacy has several P.D. programs designed for content literacy instruction this grade range: The Key Comprehension Routine, The Key Vocabulary Routine, and Keys to Content Writing.

For this post I want to focus on some resources for reading and writing instruction for older students who struggle with reading and writing. The first is the recording of a 45-minute free webinar I recently did that is available at the Keys to Literacy Free Resources website titled "Reading Intervention for Older Readers" that has a companion Padlet with handouts and resources. The second is a series of virtual workshops I recently did for the Ohio Department of Education about reading interventions for older students that they have posed on Vimeo. Part 1 is titled Identifying Student Needs Part 2 is titled Matching Students to Interventions and Part 3 is titled Progress Monitoring.

In an earlier blog post ( January 13, 2021) there are links to a variety of adolescent literacy research reports and resources, including a copy of a chapter I wrote in 2011 titled Adolescent Literacy: Addressing the Needs of Students in Grades 4-12.
Levels of Instruction
What kinds of instruction do older struggling readers need? The chart below identifies 3 categories of instruction. The most obvious category for struggling students is Basic Literacy. Depending on a student's individual profile, appropriate intervention instruction might need to focus on any of the major reading components (i.e., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension) and writing skills as basic as sentence structure. Diagnostic and progress monitoring assessments are needed to make intervention instructional decisions. We also know that for intervention to be effective at these grade levels, the instruction must be explicit, intensive in terms of time and guided practice, in small groups, and taught be trained intervention educators.

However, even if older struggling students receive a significant amount of intervention instruction, they will still spend most of their school day in general education, content area classess. This is why all teachers are needed if we are going to truly improve the literacy skills of these students. All students benefit from disciplinary and content literacy instruction that is embedded in subject areas (i.e., Tier I Core Instruction). Content literacy includes more basic vocabulary, comprehension and writing strategies that can be used in any subject area. Examples include summarizing, note taking, word knowledge checklists for vocabulary, and graphic organizers for planning before writing. Disciplinary literacy includes teaching students advanced literacy skills that are unique to a particular subject. This is sometimes referred to as teaching students to read and write like a mathematician, a scientist, or historian. Content area teachers will need to differentiate and scaffold their content literacy instruction to support struggling students.

Literacy Planning for Upper Grades
Schools and districts that are looking to address the needs of older students who struggle with reading and writing should consider developing literacy plans that take stock of what already exists in terms of literacy assessment and data use, core content literacy instruction, intervention instruction, literacy resources, and literacy professional development. As part of a literacy planning process, a school or district uses this information to establish goals and action steps that make up a long-term literacy plan for meeting the needs of students in grades 4-12. Keys to Literacy offers literacy planning support. To learn more about literacy planning in middle and high school, watch this recording of a workshop I did in 2020 for the Ohio Department of Education.

References, Reports

Biancarosa, G., & Snow, C.E. (2004)."Reading Next: A Vision for Action and Research in Middle and High School Literacy". A report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve the writing of adolescents in middle and high schools - A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Graham, S.. and Hebert, M.A. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading. A Carnegie Corporation Time to Act Report. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education

Heller, R., & Greenleaf, C.L. (2007). "Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement." Alliance for Excellent Education.

Kamil, M.L., Borman, G.D., Dole, J., Kral, C.C., Salinger, T., and Torgesen, J. (2008). Improving adolescent literacy: Effective classroom and intervention practices: A Practical Guide (NCEE #2008-4027). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Murray, C.S., Wexler, J., Vaughn, S., Roberts, G., Klingler-Tackett, K., Boardman A.G., Miller, D., Kosanovich, M. (2010). Effective Instruction for Adolescent Struggling Readers: Professional Development Module - Second Edition. Center on Instruction. RMC Research Corporation.

National Institute for Literacy (2007). What content-area teachers should know about adolescent literacy. Washington, DC:National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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Reading Intervention for Older Struggling Students - Keys to Literacy

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In the last few months I have seen a growing interest in adolescent literacy. This includes content literacy instruction for all students that is integrated across subject areas, as well as intervention instruction for older students who struggle with reading and writing.

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Denise Eide, author of Uncovering the Logic of English, discusses the importance of teaching spelling rules and phonograms to sutdents to help them learn to read and spell. She argues that the English language is a complex code that needs to be taught explicitly and systematically, using sounds rather than letters and sight words.

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Logic of English Presentation #logicofenglish #scienceofreading #reading #spelling

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Dr. Louisa Moats discusses the importance of spelling instruction for all students and how teaching patterns and accuracy in spelling assists in developing both reading composition writing skills.

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Article: Five Key Principles for Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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Article: Five Key Principles for Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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Tim Shanahan offers a succint view of the five most critical elements of effectively teaching vocabulary in the classroom. These include developing rich meaning, emphasizing connections, increasing word usage, reviewing, and involving students in the vocabulary selection process.

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Effective vocabulary teaching has five key principles.

1. Focus on rich meanings, not just dictionary definitions.

Too often vocabulary instruction is no more than kids copying definitions from the dictionary. But researchers have identified a number of instructional approaches that outdo any learning that may accrue from copying definitions.

One of those key principles is that students work with more extensive or complex definitions or explanations of word meanings. Encourage the encyclopedia explanation over the dictionary meanings.

When I teach vocabulary, I often have the kids engage in trying to provide several different versions of a word's definition.

1. Dictionary definition

2. Synonyms for the word

3. Antonyms (if there are any)

4. Part of speech

5. Classification (what semantic group does it belong to, like tools or ways of talking)

6. Comparison (it is like____, but different because______)

7. Real-life examples

8. Graphic version (drawings, pictures, representations)

9. Acting it out

By the time you've come up with nine different explanations of a word you are more likely to remember it (and, of course, we can do more than just these nine if we want to get into analogies, part-whole relationships, and the like).

2. Emphasize the connections among words.

Many vocabulary programs introduce words by category, such as focusing on words from health and medicine or about transportation, including some that have research showing that they can be effective. However, direct research specifically on this aspect of teaching, suggest that word learning goes slower and without evident later advantage from the extra work that mastering these words entails needed to master these sets of words.

And, yet, evidence reveals that the lexicons in our heads are organized in various networks, not like dictionaries. When you remember a word, you draw from memory a plethora of related ideas-attributes, functions, and synonyms related to that word.

Start thinking diesel trucks and words like wheel, tire, dump truck, gasoline, and highway will not be far behind.

There are circumstances in which it is necessary to simultaneously introduce collections of closely related words that may require fine or subtle distinctions, such as when kids are learning about the structure of cells or atoms. I'll give that a pass, since such introductions are likely to be accompanied by a much deeper dive into the underlying concepts in such cases.

I also think it is quite reasonable when teaching words to get kids thinking about words about that concept that they may already have mastered. Linking a new word to a concept, is very different than trying to learn and link a whole collection of words.

I would avoid introducing together plethora, dearth, scarcity, cornucopia, shortage, plenty, sufficient, abundant, and liberal as some programs do. Collect such words over time as they are learned and then later you can have kids comparing the ideas or fitting them into continuum or network.

One teacher I know has her students classifying the vocabulary each week in bulletin board folders, and when a folder accumulates several related words, they revisit them as a set.

3. Promote usage of the words.

It is not enough that kids study word meanings, but they have to learn to use these words in their reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Instruction should create opportunities for kids to use words in all of these ways.

For instance, that rich vocabulary assignment that was described earlier can be done by groups of kids working together to come up with those multiple definitions. That kind of cooperation requires that kids talk with each other about the words. Additionally, I often assign small numbers of words to each group and then have them get together to teach each other the words that their groups studied... more speaking and listening.

One might reward kids for using the studied vocabulary in their writing - or that can be required in various ways.

Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown came up with the idea of "word wizards," which gave kids extra points in vocabulary if they could bring in evidence that they had confronted or used the words of interest. Kids get very turned on if they run across some of the vocabulary when watching television or playing their favorite computer game.

4. Review is important.

It can be hard to retain vocabulary if you don't get a lot of opportunity to use it. We may teach vocabulary because certain words were prominent in the texts, we were reading this week, but then kids might not see them for a long time.

There are many ways to deal with vocabulary, such as having one day a week when you only work with words that have been taught (and supposedly learned) in the past - or perhaps entire weeks might be devoted to this throughout the year.

I'm a fan of including words from past weeks on vocabulary quizzes and for the use of vocabulary notebooks to help punch up kids' writing during revision.

Another way of ensuring the words stick, is to see how many additional words students can construct morphologically, adding prefixes or suffixes or altering parts of speech and so on. I've written about some of the important work being done on morphology by Peter and Jeffrey Bowers before (and you can search for that on my site or on Google).

5. Involve students in identifying some of the words to be studied.

I noted earlier that much vocabulary learning is incidental and, therefore, largely out of the province of schools. However, not all kids are equally good at such learning and even for those who it is easier, it can still be a tough slog requiring many experiences with a word to get it to stick.

One thing that we can do to help develop a "word consciousness" among our students is to involve them in identifying unknown words from their own reading - and to include these in your classroom curriculum. When readers get used to noticing their lack of knowledge of particular words, they will be more likely to try to resolve those gaps when reading. Kids will also be more motivated if they have some say so over the curriculum as well.

This article is excerpted from the longer blog post, Five Things Every Teacher Should Know About Vocabulary Instruction .

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Five Key Principles for Effective Vocabulary Instruction

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Much vocabulary is learned without formal teaching. We gain words from conversation, observation, television/media, and reading. However, research shows that explicitly teaching vocabulary can measurably improve reading comprehension - if we teach the right words well enough. Here are five key principles to effective vocabulary instruction.

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Joan Sedita gives an overview of the steps involved in the Key Vocabulary Routine from Keys to Literacy, including how and why they should be used in all classrooms.

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The Key Vocabulary Routine - Vocabulary Instruction for grades 3-12

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This course module is part of the Reading 101 series from Reading Rockets. This section outlines the four types of vocabulary and how to assess skills related to vocabulary in struggling readers. It offers a review of how to teach vocabulary both directly and indirectly as well as instruction options in various vocabulary skills.

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Oral vocabulary refers to words that we use in speaking or comprehend in listening. Reading vocabulary refers to words we comprehend or use in print. In the Simple View of Reading, which describes reading as having two basic components - word recognition and comprehension - vocabulary falls under language comprehension.

Letter of completion

After completing this module and successfully answering the post-test questions, you'll be able to download a Letter of Completion.

Vocabulary plays an important part in learning to read. Beginning readers must use the words they hear orally to make sense of the words they see in print.

Consider, for example, what happens when a beginning reader comes to the word dig in a book. As she begins to figure out the sounds represented by the letters d, i, and g, the reader recognizes that the sounds make up a very familiar word that she has heard and said many times. It is harder for a beginning reader to figure out words that are not already part of her speaking (oral) vocabulary.

Furthermore, as children advance to reading longer, more complex types of words, many English words have more than one plausible phonetic pronunciation. For example, canopy could be cuh-NOP-ee instead of CAN-up-ee; timid could be pronounced with a long i in the first syllable (like time - id) instead of with a short i. If children already have these words in their oral vocabularies, it will be easier for them to read the words correctly.

Vocabulary is also very important to reading comprehension. Readers cannot understand what they are reading without knowing what most of the words mean. As children learn to read more advanced texts, they must learn the meaning of new words that are not part of their oral vocabulary.

There are four types of vocabulary:

Listening vocabulary: the words we need to know to understand what we hear

Speaking vocabulary: the words we use when we speak

Reading vocabulary: the words we can read and understand

Writing vocabulary: the words we use in writing

In assessment of vocabulary in beginning or struggling readers, use of an oral measure (listening and/or speaking vocabulary) is very important. A written measure of vocabulary will confound vocabulary knowledge with reading skills.

For instance, if a student who struggles with decoding gets a low score on a vocabulary measure that requires reading, it will be difficult to know whether the low score actually reflects vocabulary limitations or merely the fact that the child could not decode the words on the test.

Adapted from: Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read, Kindergarten Through Grade 3, a publication of The Partnership for Reading.

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Oral vocabulary refers to words that we use in speaking or comprehend in listening. Reading vocabulary refers to words we comprehend or use in print. In the Simple View of Reading, which describes reading as having two basic components - word recognition and comprehension - vocabulary falls under language comprehension.

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Dr. Sharon Walpole highlights the importance of appropriate comprehension instruction and the key elements to ensuring student development in this critical area of reading instruction.