Get your striving readers off to a good start for the new school year! WordFlight supports all tiers of learners—whether they are just developing essential reading skills or have gaps in their reading skill set.
It’s estimated that up to 50% of students struggle with foundational reading skills. This could mean decoding challenges, word recognition skills, or automatic word recognition skills – the critical precursor to fluency.
It is common to provide universal screening, or benchmark assessments for decoding and oral reading fluency (ORF) in elementary school. ORF assessments provide a data point on fluency that drives the next question, “why aren’t they fluent?”
These assessments trail off in the upper elementary grades and middle school years. This is the age when many of the strategies students have been using to keep up start to fail them. It is more important than ever to know if they have the foundational skills – including automatic word recognition – to read fluently. As we all know, time is of the essence.
Begin with WordFlight’s free screener.
Instead of spending 20 minutes with each student to determine whether or not they are struggling with essential decoding and automatic word recognition skills, you can screen all your students with the WordFlight online screener in just 15 minutes.
The WordFlight Screener measures the best predictors of oral reading fluency—decoding and automatic word recognition—and identifies skill levels as Proficient, At Some Risk, or At High Risk.
Three things you’ll learn about fluency from WordFlight’s Screener and support:
- Where your students are on the road to fluency.
- Why your students may not be ready for fluency.
- How to address the missing foundational skills required for fluency.
Even high-quality early literacy instruction leaves some students missing a key precursor to fluency—automatic word recognition. Without decoding abilities and word-level fluency, students cannot read fluently for comprehension. Research shows that automatic word recognition is the best predictor of fluency and a requirement for fluency and comprehension.
This screener report shows that only 5 students in this group of 28 students are proficient in decoding and automatic word recognition skills. 16 students are at some risk, and 7 students are at high risk of not reaching fluency.
How WordFlight Helps Students Learn Foundational Skills
Students who score at Some or High Risk, need structured, systematic practice to learn phonics well enough that their knowledge can be automatically retrieved and applied to new words they have not seen before. While explicit and systematic instruction is core to learning phonics, it is not enough by itself for some children to master decoding and automatic word recognition and become fluent readers.
Decades of research in cognitive science and learning offer proven and effective approaches to building the automatic, expert skills required for proficient reading. The
science that drives learning in many other fields has now successfully been applied to reading through WordFlight.
Cognitive science tells us that students need systematic, varied practice to solidify their learning. Instruction and practice tap into memory and learning systems that enable students to internalize the regularities of letter-sound relationships and generalize this knowledge across different content and contexts. It is precisely this skill that leads to automatic word recognition and then fluency.
WordFlight’s integrated system of assessment and instruction identifies specific problems and through personalized instruction moves the student beyond acquisition to generalization and application of skills.
Teachers are tasked with so much that it is difficult for them to create enough opportunities for structured, varied, and personalized practice for each student. However, WordFlight leverages adaptive technology to provide structured practice in a game-like environment.
As a result, WordFlight helps move 85% of struggling adolescent students to proficiency on these foundational skills within one school year.
NEXT TIME
The Power of the WordFlight Diagnostic