So you've assessed your students and are ready to form reading groups. This year you are ready for intentional, targeted reading instruction. Time to maximize student growth!
Part 2 of the Structured Literacy series covered the BOY reading assessments that I administer to get a clear look at where my students are and where we need to go.
Here's a quick recap of the areas I assess (for a more in-depth look at these assessments, check out this post):
reading accuracy
fluency
reading comprehension
written expression
decoding skills
phonemic awareness and sound pattern recognition
listening comprehension
morphological awareness (sometimes)
While these reading assessments are a bit time consuming at the beginning of the year, a good management plan and systems can help them run efficiently, leaving you with an incredible amount of data for the best targeted reading instruction. So, now that you have this information, what do we do with it?
A quick way to understanding the reading process is to consider the Simple View of Reading.
The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) is as follows:
decoding x language comprehension = reading comprehension
So, when we are looking at what interventions or instruction our students need, we can analyze the student's data to see where their areas of strengths and weaknesses are with this easy model.
Do they need support with decoding? (They struggle to read accurately or they struggle to read nonsense words).
Do they need support with language comprehension? (They sound like a wonderful, fluent reader, but do not understand the story).
Very quick overview for looking at student data, but a great place to start when thinking about student needs!
Now for a deeper dive into the data.
Using the basic reading comprehension assessment to determine your targeted reading instructional groups
Look at the Reading Passage and Questions Data (the first assessment described in this blog post).
Ask yourself these questions, then work through the steps that follow:
How was their word reading accuracy?
How was their fluency?
How was their comprehension?
How was their written expression?
Question 1: How was their word reading accuracy?
If they have a high word reading accuracy, move on to question 2.
If they have a low reading accuracy, it will be challenging for them to comprehend the passage and it will be challenging for them to read fluently. So this is our starting point with interventions.
Next steps for low reading accuracy score:
Complete the Nonsense Words Assessment to get a better picture of their decoding skills and where you need to begin your interventions with a phonics and morphology scope and sequence. You may also want to give a spelling assessment for further information about students' phonemic awareness and sound pattern recognition abilities.
Administer a reading comprehension assessment where you, the teacher, reads the passage aloud. I have had many students perform well on a comprehension assessment when the passage is read aloud. This let's me know that their language comprehension is strong, and the issue truly lies with their decoding and word reading skills. On the flip side, some students will still struggle with listening comprehension. They will need extra support with both word reading and language comprehension.
Forming your first groups:
Based on this data, form groups of students who need decoding interventions. Use the spelling assessment and nonsense word assessments to determine the groups' starting points.
For example, one group may have students who read short vowels with accuracy, but need interventions with all other vowel teams. Another group may read words with short vowels and magic e long vowels accurately, but need support with the remaining vowel teams. These will be two separate groups since one has slightly more advanced phonics skills. You may also have a group that struggled with both decoding and language comprehension. That will be a third group
Question 2: How was their fluency?
If they are stringing their words together as they read and reading with good expression, move onto question 3.
If they are reading in a slow, choppy manner they may be working very hard on decoding. This could prevent them from actually thinking about the text as they read because all their mental energy is being put towards reading the words on the page. Their comprehension scores will determine where you go next.
Next steps for high comprehension scores:
If they have strong comprehension, they may need specific fluency interventions (i.e., having an adult model fluent reading and having the student read the same texts aloud several times).
Next steps for low comprehension scores:
If they have weak comprehension, then they are working very hard at decoding the words on the page and need support there first. Administer the Nonsense Words assessment to find where the gaps in the students phonics are and begin interventions there. You can also use the spelling assessment for more information to guide your decoding interventions.
Look at the data from the assessment where the teacher read a passage out loud to the student and then assessed their comprehension. If their comprehension is strong, then they really do need the targeted decoding practice. If they still struggle with comprehension, they will need both language comprehension and decoding interventions.
Forming your groups:
From this data, you could have a fluency group, decoding groups (it could be multiple, depending on where their phonics gaps are), and decoding and language comprehension groups.
Question 3: How was their comprehension?
Their word accuracy was great. They read the text with incredible fluency (or at least it was decent enough). So, let's see how they are comprehending the text.
If they had excellent comprehension, move to question 4. If they struggled with comprehension, stick around for the next steps.
Next steps for weak comprehension:
Look at the Nonsense Word data.
Look at the data from the teacher's read aloud passage and student listening comprehension. Your student may really have great word reading skills and truly struggle with comprehension. If they score poorly on this assessment, then they need to be in a group with targeted comprehension interventions.
Forming your groups:
Though surprising, you may end up placing some of these students in the decoding intervention groups. You will most likely also find students who need to be in a group with a heavy focus on developing their comprehension skills.
Question 4: How was their written expression?
If they wrote out beautifully crafted comprehension answers, complete with correct grammar, punctuation, complete sentences, supportive answers, and detailed and accurate analysis of the text, then place them in a group that with challenging materials that will help them continue to soar!
If they struggled with the written comprehension piece, make sure to include in your lessons explicit instruction in crafting well thought out, grammatically correct written answers. Often times students just need some clear guidelines about writing and then are ready to use them to put their already great ideas onto the paper.
And Now You Have Your Reading Groups!
And there you have it! Your class is ready for meaningful, targeted instruction. I do want to emphasize one important point. Just because a group is targeting one skill, does not mean the other skills are put by the wayside. Every group, regardless of level or targeting area, should have DAILY instruction and practice in fluency, morphology (and phonics depending on grade level), vocabulary, comprehension, and written expression. Targeted interventions does not mean dropping these other critical components of reading. If we were to truly focus only on one area at a time, we would just end up needed interventions in all these other spaces later!
Stay tuned for the next post on what an intervention lesson actually looks like!
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