Oct 9, 2026 | Assessment, Closing the Literacy Gap, Foundational Skills, Morpheme Lessons
About one student out of every four in the upper elementary and secondary school lacks adequate decoding skills (Tortorelli, 2025). As they progress through the early grades, most students learn basic phonics. However, a significant number fail to acquire the skills...
Sep 11, 2026 | Assessment, Closing the Literacy Gap
According to a highly respected global assessment, reading achievement in the United States is above average (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2026; OECD, 2026). In the latest administration of PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), which was...
Aug 28, 2026 | Assessment, Foundational Skills, Reading Disability/Dyslexia
Early in my teaching career, as the newly appointed chair of a junior high’s reading department, I undertook the task of assigning all the school’s seventh graders to reading classes based on their reading levels. I planned to use the results of a national...
Aug 19, 2026 | Assessment, Foundational Skills
With the 2026-2027 school year beginning in some parts of the country and soon to start in others, I thought it might be helpful to post an updated version of this previously published blog, which presents information for easy-to-administer informal foundational...
Aug 29, 2025 | Assessment, Closing the Literacy Gap
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...
Aug 29, 2025 | Assessment, Closing the Literacy Gap
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...
