Heartland AEA Literacy Newsletter

The goal of reading is to comprehend what is read. Comprehension involves developing many skills and subskills to the point of automaticity, that is, the ability to very efficiently perform those skills so that very little cognitive energy is exerted in the process. To reach automaticity, a person must repeatedly engage in that activity, receive feedback on his or her performance, make corrections in their behaviors, and continue to engage in that behavior. Learning to do anything with a high level of efficiency and skill requires practice. Reading is a complicated behavior that requires lots of practice. What is important to note: not all practice is created equal.

For practice to be meaningful and effective, it must also be explicit, focused,
and targeted. Additionally, said practice must be based on current scientific knowledge, not conjecture. This is obviously the case for learning to read, spell, and write.

To become efficient readers, students must develop many reading subskills to the point of automaticity. Appropriate, sustained, and intensive practice is essential to developing automaticity. The Fall, 2023 issue of Perspectives on Language and Literacy explores practice—what it is, why it is important, and how to do it. To answer these questions, this issue draws upon what we know from the science of learning, particularly as it pertains to learning to read. According to Vaughn (2021), practice leads to automaticity, which is “tied to the brain reorganization that must occur in order for children to read.” Seidenberg explains that practice linking together multiple dimensions of words can contribute to necessary brain reorganization and automaticity (Seidenberg, 2017).

Key Takeaways from the Power of Practice Issue Introduction:

• Practice is a factor in closing the gap in achievement
• Practice is a key element in the teaching-learning process to facilitate learning outcomes.
• Practice is where the science of reading and the science of learning merge.

Sharon Vaughn and Jack Fletcher focused on the concept of a Practice Gap in their article. They present a rationale with suggestions for the role of deliberate practice in improving reading outcomes for students with significant reading problems. Though not explaining all of the reading difficulties that students experience, adequate deliberate practice reading is a highly influential lever for improving outcomes for students with reading difficulties and disabilities (RDD).

Key Takeaways from the Practice Gap:

• The practice gap contributes to the challenges experienced by students with reading difficulties and disabilities.
• Students with weak reading skills are less efficient and read more slowly, contributing to reduced practice.
• Expert performance results from active engagement in deliberate practice with teachers or coaches monitoring the structured, organized practice.

Jamie Peavler provides an in-depth look at practice regarding types, time and support in the article What Do We Mean by Practice? Explicit instruction is an essential component of structured literacy; practice is an essential component of explicit instruction.Within a well-designed explicit instruction lesson, many opportunities

for purposeful practice are provided to students. By thinking through the type, time, and level of support each form of practice provides, we are better prepared to match our purpose to the right practice activity. Practice type refers to the organizational structure of practice items and activities. How items are grouped can have an impact on the level of effort required and the rate at which the skill is acquired. Time relates to whether practice items are concentrated within a short period of time or spread out over multiple sessions. Multiple repetitions within a narrow time frame support quick acquisition; revisiting that content again over time supports long-term retention.

Key Takeaways from What Do We Mean By Practice?

• Different forms of practice accomplish different purposes.
• Simply providing more practice is not as effective as providing the right practice.
• A well-designed lesson incorporates practice in meaningful ways, following a gradual release of support structure.
  

Stephanie Stollar discusses the role of assessment to match students to practice in the article, Using Assessment to Match Students to Effective Practice . To accomplish the goal of reading to learn,

the word recognition and language comprehension skills that support reading comprehension must become automatic through sufficient practice. When to practice and what type of practice to use can be informed by assessment data that supports analysis of where students are on the learning hierarchy (Daly et al., 1996; VanDerHeyden & Burns, this issue). The likelihood of implementing effective practice improves when teachers know whether to design practice opportunities for increasing accuracy, building fluency, or promoting generalization.

Key Takeaways From Using Assessment to Match Students To Effective Practice:

• Students should not practice for fluency until they perform new skills accurately.
• Assessment data can inform next steps for instruction and the most useful type of practice.
• The type of practice can be matched to phases of the instructional hierarchy.
  

These article excerpts are from Perspectives on Language and Literacy, Volume 49, Issue 1, October, 2023

Panorama is releasing three new reports, anticipated December 1. These reports are optional and not related to any Iowa accountability beyond the need to do what we can to help improve student outcomes. You will find these reports on the left side menu in Panorama Student Success at the School level view or above.

Interventions Dashboard: summarizes the status of intervention plans in terms of Up To Date (PM collection is current), On Track (student PM data is on track to meet goal) and Goal Met (completed plans that met the goal). Use this report as another tool to monitor PM practices and effectiveness.

Click to read more about the interventions dashboard

Attendance Needs: identifies students missing 10% or more of school days and those with/without an attendance plan. You can view at a summary level and click in to see the individual students (based on permissions) and define an intervention directly from this report view.

Recently Absent: shows the students missing 3 or more out of the last 10 school days. It can be viewed by student groups and you can click through from the school view to find the students meeting the criteria, and can create interventions directly from this view.

Click to read more about both attendance reports

The new reports have the usual options to filter and view by different groupings. Take some time to explore what you can learn from them and think about how they can be used in your school’s improvement efforts. If you have questions about your data, please use the Panorama ticket system and provide screenshots and examples so we know what you are looking at.

We frequently get questions about how Panorama Student Success relates to district accountability. Perhaps this information will help clarify and reduce any confusion.

• Early Literacy Implementation (ELI) literacy status (i.e., Persistently At-Risk, At-Risk and Adequately Progressing) is calculated in the Student Success system, and reporting of ELI-related interventions is a requirement for public schools.
• The Conditions for Learning Survey collection is collected within Panorama each spring.
• None of the Healthy Indicator or other reports in Panorama Student Success feed into any accountability system. They are not part of ESSA accountability or school report cards.
• However, many of the reports and data tools can help with school improvement efforts, including identification of at-risk students, evaluating intervention effectiveness, and acting as an early warning system to help identify students who may need extra attention to be successful. In other words, the tools provided can improve outcomes for students, and reduce the risk of encountering district or school accountability issues.

Important information about winter break and progress monitoring in FastBridge

Winter break is only a few weeks away. In the FastBridge system some districts opt to disable PM for the full week school is not in session. Disabling the PM week is district wide and non-reversible once the week begins. This function essentially treats the week as if it didn’t exist. Non-weekly schedules shift and no PM forms are released for the disabled week. Before disabling a partial school week, please make sure to confirm district-wide that nobody at all will be able to do any PM that week. Every year we get tickets from people who cannot administer required progress monitoring for IEPs, etc. because someone disabled PM for the district for the entire week. Please note that disabling a week of PM in FastBridge has no impact on the reports in Panorama.

The Winter screening window opens January 2. As usual, plan on about two weeks to conduct the majority of your screening. We’ve been fortunate to have fairly reliable technology, but it’s still a good idea to have contingency plans in place in case any system issues should develop. MTSS Systems Status MTSS Systems Support Map for Users

The ELA alternate assessment results will soon import into Student Success and be visible on the students page. The ELA alternate is the early literacy assessment for students on alternate assessment. This is the first step toward including these results in the Healthy Indicator reports later this school year. The ELA winter reporting window opens January 22.

The Iowa Reading Research Center has launched a Caregiver Resource Hub to help caregivers stay

informed and actively engage in their child’s education, we have created a Caregivers Resource Hub on the Iowa Reading Research Center website. This hub includes eLearning content specially designed for the caregivers of K-12 students. The modules may be particularly beneficial for caregivers in Iowa, as they reference Iowa resources and regulations. However, much of the content is broadly applicable for caregivers in other states as well. The hub currently provides information and resources on three main topics:

• The Science of Reading
• Advocating for Your Student
• Core Literacy Skills

These are informal eLearning modules, so there’s no need to worry about enrollment or grades. Our goal is to provide interactive and accessible text, visual, and audio content that caregivers can explore at their own pace to learn how to best support their child’s learning.

A second edition of these free instructional materials designed for students in 3rd grade and above who have challenges in reading multisyllabic words. Below is an in-depth description of the instructional materials and links to the updated materials.

Word Connections is a supplemental reading intervention program. It includes 40 lessons (40 min each), divided into four units of instruction. Word Connections was developed for students in third grade and above who continue to experience challenges with word reading even though they have developed foundational decoding skills. The lessons focus on promoting automaticity with reading “big words.” This approach to multisyllabic word reading integrates multiple opportunities for students to manipulate and read words, rather than focusing on rule-based instruction. The Word Connections program includes seven instructional activities:

• Warm-Up: Students practice prerequisite skills. Each lesson, the teacher introduces cards with different target vowel patterns. Students read these vowel patterns in isolation and then within nonsense words.

• Affix Bank: Students are explicitly taught high frequency prefixes and suffixes. Each lesson, the teacher introduces new affixes. They read affix, provide a sample word, define, and then support students as the write on their Affix Bank chart.

• Word Play: Games focused on assembling or blending word parts. The teacher introduces the lesson’s five Spotlight Words, which are used to combine with affix cards. To increase engagement, five different word-building games are used across the program.

• Beat the Clock: Students read words by breaking apart or segmenting into parts. Students are given a new list with 40 multisyllabic words each lesson and the teacher supports them as they circle and read affixes, choral read affixes, and choral read words. Each student completes two timed readings, trying to “beat the clock” the second time.

• Write Word: Students engage in spelling practice using learned affixes. The teacher provides an affix to the group and students write words with 2-3 syllables (including nonsense words). Students share words and teacher provides corrective feedback, as needed.

• Speedy Read: Students are given a new word list each lesson. They complete a group reading of the word list and then each student reads for 30 sec. They log the number of words read in 30 sec on their Speedy Read chart.

• Text Reading: Fluency practice is transitioned from word-level to text-level. We begin with sentence reading, maze sentences that require students to select the correct affix for the base word, and cloze sentences that require students to insert missing affix to complete the word. Unit 3 and 4 focus on reading passages (expository text) with multisyllabic words added.

Download the Instructional Scope & Sequence for a listing of components and activity details across the 40 lessons. Download Word Connections Teacher Manual and Student Materials here.

Two potential pathways for improving reading outcomes for students with reading disabilities are presented: (a) systematically integrating self-regulation instructional practices within reading interventions and (b) aligning small-group reading intervention with core reading instruction to reduce the pressure on the executive system. Two separate studies conducted with fourth grade students with significant reading difficulties, one related to integrating self-regulation within a reading intervention and one related to aligning core instruction and reading intervention, are presented. Similar to many past high-quality studies conducted with older students with reading disabilities, results revealed no statistically significant differences on commercially developed measures of reading comprehension. However, results on standardized measures of word reading and text reading fluency and researcher-developed measures of vocabulary and text comprehension underscore the promise of these approaches and support the notion that considering self-regulation in the context of reading instruction may be a productive conduit for supporting the needs of students with significant reading difficulties.

Capin, P., Stevens, E.A. and Vaughn, S. (2023), Self-Regulation and Reading Comprehension: Integrating and Aligning to Improve Reading Outcomes. Mind, Brain, and Education, 17: 362-372. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12353

These four page resources provide guidance in how teachers and parents can support students in becoming self-regulated readers.

Helping Your Students Become Self-Regulated Readers

Helping Your Child Become a Self-Regulated Reader

“Prior knowledge creates a scaffolding for information in memory,” they explained after seeing the results. “Students with high reading ability but low knowledge of baseball were no more capable of recall or summarization than were students with low reading ability and low knowledge of baseball.”

That modest experiment kicked off 30 years of research into reading comprehension, and study after study confirmed Recht and Leslie’s findings: Without background knowledge, even skilled readers labor to make sense of a topic. But those studies left a lot of questions unanswered: How much background knowledge is needed for better decoding? Is there a way to quantify and measure prior knowledge?

A 2019 study published in Psychological Science is finally shedding light on those mysteries. The researchers discovered a “knowledge threshold” when it comes to reading comprehension: If students were unfamiliar with 59 percent of the terms in a topic, their ability to understand the text was “compromised.”

In the study, 3,534 high school students were presented with a list of 44 terms and asked to identify whether each was related to the topic of ecology. Researchers then analyzed the student responses to generate a background-knowledge score, which represented their familiarity with the topic.

Without any interventions, students then read about ecosystems and took a test measuring how well they understood what they had read.

Students who scored less than 59 percent on the background-knowledge test also performed relatively poorly on the subsequent test of reading comprehension. But researchers noted a steep improvement in comprehension above the 59 percent threshold—suggesting both that a lack of background knowledge can be an obstacle to reading comprehension, and that there is a baseline of knowledge that rapidly accelerates comprehension.

Why does background knowledge matter? Reading is more than just knowing the words on the page, the researchers point out. It’s also about making inferences about what’s left off the page—and the more background knowledge a reader has, the better able he or she is to make those inferences.

“Collectively, these results may help identify who is likely to have a problem comprehending information on a specific topic and, to some extent, what knowledge is likely required to comprehend information on that topic,” conclude Tenaha O'Reilly, the lead author of the study, and his colleagues.

5 Ways Teachers Can Build Background Knowledge

Spending a few minutes making sure that students meet the knowledge threshold for a topic can yield outsized results. Here’s what teachers can do:

• Mind the gap: You may be an expert in civil war history, but be mindful that your students will represent a wide range of existing background knowledge on the topic. Similarly, take note of the cultural, social, economic, and racial diversity in your classroom. You may think it’s cool to teach physics using a trebuchet, but not all students have been exposed to the same ideas that you have.
• Identify common terms in the topic. Ask yourself, “What are the main ideas in this topic? Can I connect what we’re learning to other big ideas for students?” If students are learning about earthquakes, for example, take a step back and look at what else they should know about—perhaps Pangaea, Earth’s first continent, or what tectonic plates are. Understanding these concepts can anchor more complex ideas like P and S waves. And don’t forget to go over some broad-stroke ideas—such as history’s biggest earthquakes—so that students are more familiar with the topic.
• Incorporate low-stakes quizzes. Before starting a lesson, use formative assessment strategies such as entry slips or participation cards to quickly identify gaps in knowledge.
• Build concept maps. Consider leading students in the creation of visual models that map out a topic’s big ideas—and connect related ideas that can provide greater context and address knowledge gaps. Visual models provide another way for students to process and encode information, before they dive into reading.
• Sequence and scaffold lessons. When introducing a new topic, try to connect it to previous lessons: Reactivating knowledge the students already possess will serve as a strong foundation for new lessons. Also, consider your sequencing carefully before you start the year to take maximum advantage of this effect.
  

SRSD is an evidence-based pedagogy. It teaches students how to use the writing process and equips them with the necessary skills and strategies to become self-regulated, successful writers. Through carefully analyzing peer-written exemplars and published mentor texts, SRSD exposes learners to the features of effective writing at the outset and all through the year.

Explicit instruction prepares students to incorporate these features into their own pieces. They learn key strategies and solidify their skills through: collaborative writes, self/peer feedback and embedded deliberate practice. To facilitate a gradual release, teachers model writing, offer scaffolds and support ongoing goal setting.

How to start SRSD in a classroom

Teachers establish a positive climate. Students then complete a pre-assessment which they use to set their own writing goals. Next, educators use thinkSRSD’s 6 routines below to on-ramp students into using POWER to guide themsleves whenever they write. Teachers then continue to analyze exemplars, lead collaborative practice, offer deliberate skills practice (i.e. sentence writing), and revisit goal setting, gradually releasing students to work independently as ready.

6 Routines:

Routine 1: Exemplars and Tools

Routine 2: Plan and Organize

Routine 3: Revise and Edit

Routine 4: Self-Instruct

Routine 5: Collaborative Literacy Practice

Routine 6: Score and Set Goals

Below is a link to the Self-Regulated Strategy Development website where there is access to free resources.

thinkSRSD

SRSD will continue to be a focus in upcoming Heartland AEA literacy newsletters.

The Iowa Department of Education is launching a sustained and job-embedded Science of Reading professional development opportunity statewide to support evidence-based reading instruction, improve grade-level reading proficiency, and close achievement gaps across the state. LETRS®(Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) and LETRS® for Administrators are being offered at no cost to eligible K-5 educators and administrators.

Who is eligible to register?

Lexia LETRS® for elementary educators is approved for any K-5 Iowa educator who provides reading instruction to students in a public school or public charter school. This includes:

• K-5 educators
• Special education teachers
• Title I educators
• *Instructional coaches

Lexia LETRS® for Administrators is approved for any K-5 Iowa administrator serving in a public school or public charter school. This includes:

• *Instructional coaches
• District administrators
• District curriculum leaders
• Building principals

*Instructional coaches may choose to take either course. They will not need to take both courses.