S4 Ep2 - Tracking Reading Growth Without a Benchmark Assessment

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Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, the place where we talk all things literacy and education. I'm Jocelyn and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this episode.

I try to maintain a mix of research-driven information and practical know-how in all that I do, and the podcast is no exception. In today's episode, I'm addressing a question that comes up frequently:

Without a benchmark assessment, how do we track student growth and how do I communicate effectively with parents about their child's development?

The other part of the picture is:

How do I choose a text for students to read if I don't have the levels to work with anymore?

This episode coincides with the release of a brand new tool that I've developed to help you navigate understanding the progression of skills and knowledge as students learn to read. It helps you set goals for reading, track growth and communicate all of this with parents, other members of your team and the students themselves.

If you are a Resource Room member, the live Mastermind held the week that this episode airs in August 2024, provides additional details and guidance around reading development and using this tool. Of course, if you're listening after this date and are a Resource Room member, the recording is available to you, along with the recordings of all other Masterminds and courses run inside the Resource Room membership, but the tool is available to everyone, whether or not you're a member.

You can find the download link in the show notes of this episode, Season four, Episode two.

Before we get to the tool that I've created, let's talk about reading assessment and how our views on reading development have changed over time. For the longest time, we relied on benchmark assessments from leveled reading schemes to help us assess and monitor student growth. The problem with these assessments is that the levels they assessed against didn't actually mean what we thought they did. Now, I'm not going to say that they were completely useless.

When I talk with teachers who are making the move away from benchmark assessment, they often say that they did get something out of conducting the assessment. They got to spend time with students one-on-one and they got to make observations about particular reading behaviours that they could use to set goals. All of that is fair and valid and it makes perfect sense, but benchmark assessments and the levels they presented were, and I'm sorry to put it like this, but they were made up. There was no link to research, frameworks of reading development, or established theories at all.

If you or your team is working through this particular issue right now, have a listen to Season One, Episode Seven of the Structured Literacy podcast, Why It's So Scary to Let Go of Benchmark Assessment.

For many schools, the move from benchmark assessment based on a level reading scheme involved the introduction of an assessment based on a decodable text series. There are several around that involve assessing phoneme-grapheme correspondences, word-level blending and text-level reading. The texts that are used are those aligned with the sequence of coding complexity set out by the series. These assessments are certainly a step up from the level text benchmark assessment.

My concern, though, is that, while the monitoring of correspondences and phonemic skills is wonderful, teachers are still relying on a level text assessment of sorts. And, of course, the levels that come with decodable text respond to more up-to-date thinking about reading development and have a phonics focus rather than a sight word one. But are teachers actually building understanding of the full range of skills and knowledge developing readers need to progress in their learning? That's my question, and I think that the answer is sometimes maybe yes and sometimes maybe no.

I'm not saying that if your school is using one of these assessment tools, you're doing something wrong, so please don't take my messaging that way. What I am saying is that we need to acknowledge the strengths and limitations of all tools that we use.

My Framework

The framework and tool that I'm sharing with you today can be one part of your decision-making picture, but it won't be the only one. For bigger picture assessments and screening of risk, many schools are making the move to normed tools such as DIBELs and Acadians. These tools are not assessments in that they tell us what a student has learned. As such, they don't give you a level or a score. These tools are screeners of risk, so if a student's score is in the green zone on the spreadsheet, that doesn't mean that they get a C. It means that if all goes well and progress continues at an appropriate rate, the student's risk of reading failure or difficulty is low.

You might be wondering why I'd bother to create a framework and accompanying tool for supporting students through reading development at all when there are already assessments and screeners available. The reason that I developed this was because those assessments and screeners that are currently available to us aren't nearly nuanced enough and beyond a few basics of learn this code and learn to blend, there isn't enough specific guidance for setting goals and fully communicating about a student's growth through reading.

Many of us are also in the tricky space of not really understanding when we can move students on from decodables. Because we don't want to cause harm to students, we may then be limiting their reading material to decodables for far too long, and not helping them embrace less controlled text when they would actually be perfectly capable of managing them.

Let's run through this thing that I've made and you can make up your own mind about whether it might add some value to your practice or your school.

Firstly, it's called From Phonics to Uncontrolled Texts: An Instructional Framework For Moving Into, Through and Past Decodable Texts. It's wordy, but it says exactly what it is.

This tool helps you to:

• track students' reading development,
• set goals for next steps in learning,
• communicate with families and other team members and,
• build your understanding of the research foundations about the decisions we make about how to effectively support student reading development.

The document, that is completely free by the way, is organised into four sections.

Section one provides a rationale for the tool and guidance on how to use it.

Section two is a one-page overview of a student's early reading development, from first learning code to being able to go to the library and just choose text of their choice.

The third section breaks down each step in this journey and provides a brief explanation of why it's important and some fundamental information based in research.

The final section of the tool is a full reference list with links to open access papers and sources so that you can follow up and evaluate what I've shared for yourself.

I won't unpack the whole tool for you, you can download it and have a good look yourself, but I will provide a quick overview so that you can decide whether it's something that might be useful for you and your team.

The one-page overview is intended to be a simple record that follows a student from the beginning of school to the point where they can read uncontrolled texts of their choice. It's divided into three sections with checkpoint boxes at three critical junctures. There are 16 milestones listed that relate to knowledge, skills and reading behaviours. The idea is that as each milestone is reached, a box is coloured in and dated. This provides a wonderful visual for school staff, students and parents to be able to see where a student is up to in their journey and what specific goals are being worked on to help them reach the next checkpoint. In developing the milestones of learning to read, I used a variety of sources, including including the Hasbrook Tindall fluency norms, the Australian Curriculum General Capabilities, many research papers and the writings of researchers and experts in the field.

I haven't tried to reinvent any wheels or muddy the waters of school-level decision-making. Trying to align competing assessments and monitoring tools is a recipe for disaster, so I've avoided creating that situation for you in a couple of ways. Firstly, the tool doesn't list particular phoneme-grapheme correspondences for students to learn. Your school's chosen phonics program or approach will determine that focus at particular times. Instead, the code is discussed in general terms and you'll make decisions about that learning as works best considering the programs and tools you already have in place.

Similarly, I haven't listed specific high frequency words, as the focus of this learning will depend on many factors, including your phonics program and the core decodable text series you use. You also won't find any grade levels listed on the tool. It's good to know what reasonable expectations are for reading development in each grade, but ultimately supporting students is about meeting them where they're up to. If a student is in Grade Five and still learning core phoneme-grapheme correspondences, that's the learning they need. Similarly, if a student has reached the end of Year One and is reading at 90 words per minute from an unseen picture book or other appropriate text, then they need extending.

But phonics and high frequency words are actually only a small part of the picture. Critical but small.

What I've attempted to do here is to provide the nuance of understanding and reading skills that's missing from our existing tools.

To this end, the reading milestones include things like:

The student stops and rereads when comprehension breaks down.

That's about comprehension monitoring, which is necessary if students are to read for meaning.

Another milestone is:

Can sound out an unknown word and tidy up mispronunciation without guessing.

That one is about set for variability, a critical skill in moving students on from fully decodable text.

Another one is:

Attends to punctuation to support phrasing, including commas.

This one is about prosody, that third element of fluency.

The way that I see this sitting is as an overarching guide to reading development.

The one page overview would be like the cover page on a student's file, with your phonics and phonemic awareness assessments sitting behind it.

Stanislas De Haan says that it takes approximately three years for a student to develop the ability to automatically lift words from the page, moving from sounding out words to automatically recognising them.

Mary-anne Wolfe describes this change as a student moving from a skilled decoder to a strategic reader.

This tool covers the development from early reader to skilled decoder and ends when a student can read an elementary text that contains a range of sentence types, a large number of high frequency words, polysyllabic words, a range of punctuation and the full alphabetic code at 90 words per minute. That term of elementary text comes from the Australian Curriculum General Capabilities.

This tool will not replace your phonics monitoring, phonemic awareness assessment or normed screener. It simply gives you a big picture overview at the same time as sharing more nuanced milestones beyond phonics. These goals can then be communicated to families when they're reading with their child at home and with other staff members when we're working with students in a variety of settings. You can also use the document as the basis for professional learning for your team.

Remember the third section is a brief outline of why each milestone is important and contains links to research. You can spread the milestones out over a year and tackle them one by one as a team, in short chunks, to build your knowledge and capacity to make decisions for student learning.

Think about this, if you did this, your team would be highly knowledgeable about early reading development by this time next year, without the need to have days out of school or overwhelm everyone. It's important to know how to use our programs and resources well, but I think it's more important that we know why we're doing what we're doing. It's only when we have knowledge, are confident with pedagogy and know when to do what in response to student need that we can really be moving the needle on student outcomes in a big way.

Programs are necessary, but we aren't going to get where we want to go without building teacher knowledge and capacity.

This episode has been a little different from the usual fair, but it might just have given you some food for thought about how we think about reading development, how we track it and how we set goals. You can download From Phonics to Uncontrolled Texts from the show notes of this episode at jocelynseamereducation.com.

And Resource Room members, if you're listening to the episode on the morning that it's released, be sure to join me for the live Mastermind session where I unpack the rationale and practical elements of using this tool. If you're listening after the release date, the recording is there waiting for you.

Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you in the next episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. Bye

Useful Links

S1 E7 - Why It's So Scary to Let go of Benchmark Assessment