Morpheme Monday 1: equi (equa), nox (noct)
Note to the Teacher This is the first post in a blog entitled "Morpheme Mondays." In the blog I will provide discussions of morphemes and supply related activities. I will attempt to make the discussions relevant and engaging. The blog is designed for grades 3-4 and up but would be appropriate for any students in the upper grades who are not...
Unleashing the Power of Morphemic Analysis
Morphemic analysis has the power to accelerate students' word knowledge with a minimum of time and effort. For instance, chances are your students know erase, pretend, and active, but might have difficulty reading the words erasure, pretension, and activate. In an extensive, classic study of the word knowledge of students in grades 4-12, the...
The Decoding Self-Teaching Hypothesis: Students Teaching Themselves
Students' ability to decode proficiently may depend on how well they teach themselves. According to the extensively researched self-teaching hypothesis, as students decode words that are unfamiliar in print, they match letters to sounds in order to read the words and create representations of these words in memory. Reading past for paste, the...
Using Adaptive Assessment
i-Ready Diagnostic is a diagnostic asessment. Because it is adaptive, it provides more valid and reliable data on students reading below grade level than do most state and most other standardized tests. The typical standardized test is written at grade level, with maybe a passage or two below grade level and some passages above grade...
Results of the 2024 NAEP Reading Assessment: Implications for Instruction
According to the results of the latest NAEP reading assessment, there was a drop of 2 points in the average performance of both fourth and eighth graders when compared with 2022 test results. According to Harvard psychometrician Andrew Ho, each point on the scale is estimated to represent 3 weeks of learning (Mervosh, 2022). Thus, the average...
Impact of Covid on Reading Achievement: Five Years Later
Despite extensive efforts by educators, reading achievement nation-wide lags behind pre-pandemic levels. A study that included nearly 12 million students who took the i-Ready Diagnostic for Reading assessment during the 2024-2025 school year revealed that fewer students in grades 1-4 are reaching grade-level (Table 1.1) (Curriculum Associates,...
Morphology for All Students: Using Morphemic Analysis to Foster Foundational Skills
Along with being taught how to sound out words, students should be taught, from the earliest stages, the morphology of words. As I noted in the last blog, being aware of the underlying morphemic structures of words aids both reading and writing. For the word does, understanding that it is composed of the morphemes <do> + <es> and is...
Morphology: A Key Foundational Skill
Morphology: A Key Foundational Skill Initially, students are taught to use phonological information to read words. This works well for words such as hat and pet, which have spellings that are easily translated into sounds, but it doesn’t work as well for words, such as does or...
Achieving Equity with an Exemplary Literacy Program
Better Start Literacy The Better Start Literacy Approach has been highly successful in developing the literacy of year 1 (kindergarten) students with low language in New Zealand. Students provided with Better Start outperformed students taught with the schools’ typical approach. Key elements in the program were a focus on phonemic awareness,...
Accelerating Students’ Foundational Literacy Progress with Proper Placement
If students are “taught” skills that they already know or they aren’t ready for, or if they are given reading materials that are too easy or too challenging, valuable instructional time will be wasted and the students will likely be frustrated or bored. On my website, buildingliteracy.org, I have listed under the Free Resources tab a number of...