Pennington Publishing Blog

My district has decided to “speed pilot” two reading intervention programs for our secondary schools: Language!® Live is the re-vamped Language!® program from Voyager Sopris with new contributing author Louisa Cook Moats; and Read 180 Next Generation is the thoroughly revised offering from mega publisher Scholastic/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with new contributing authors Kevin Feldman and Kate Kinsella. The latter uses the Read 180 Foundational Reading Assessment. At my middle school we have one pilot teacher for each program. Training has been extensive from these two eager publishers because Elk Grove Unified is the third largest district in California and a district-wide adoption would be quite a plum for either of the two companies.

So I’ve been able to check out these two programs to compare to my own. A bold move given that my cost per class of 25 students is about $20 per student, whereas the cost per class for each of the two comparative programs is closer to that of a well-equipped Lexus. I started my comparisons with the screening and placement assessments in Read 180. Of course, as a publisher (check out my program advert to the right of the article, you would expect bias. See what you think.)

Our school has always struggled with screening and placement for our “support” classes. As a large middle school with about 1100 students, we have five “feeder” elementary schools and lots of transfer students. Program scheduling is a nightmare. We have used a variety of assessments, teacher recommendations, and decision-making tools to place students with mixed results. Since teachers have done “their own thing” in the “support” classes for years, the “curriculum” and instruction has only haphazardly matched the student needs indicated by the placement tools. Since the placement criteria has been a “moving target,” misplacement of students has been an ongoing concern. Our principal makes all transfer decisions and, fair to say, these are rare. Once students are placed in a “support” class, they remain all year. So if the district adoption of either the Read 180 or Language Live! program would mean that screening and placement assessments and exit criteria would be honored at our school, we might be moving onto the right track. Or will we? This article will focus on the Read 180 Next Generation Foundational Reading Assessment.

Read 180 Foundational Reading Assessment

As described in a companion article, READ 180 and Phonemic Awareness, the first part of the Foundational Reading Assessment (designed by Dr. Richard K. Wagner as a K-2 test and published as such for another program) consists of a short random sample 12 rhymes, initial, final, and medial sounds (3 each). I can hear kindergarten teachers cringing at the sample size and components. The take-away from my article is that the test assesses only part of what constitutes phonological or phonemic awareness and is not teachable because it is not comprehensive.

The next component of the assessment is the Letter-Word Identification Strand, which includes 10 items designed to measure students’ knowledge of uppercase and lowercase letter names and 20 items designed to measure students’ sight word knowledge. The last component, the Word Attack Strand, includes “40 total items, specifically 10 items designed to measure students’ ability to identify letter sounds and 30 nonword items designed to measure students’ decoding skills” (SRI College and Career Technical Guide).

Sight Words

“A total of 20 sight word items were developed using the 100 most frequent words from Fry’s (2000) 1000 Instant Words. The distractor items were other high-frequency sight words or common decodable words.”

Criticism

Sight words are, by definition exceptions to the rules. Random sampling presupposes that the components are representative of the whole. How can there be external validity when the sample does not match the group? It’s a bit like tasting 6 of the 31 (the same percentage) ice cream flavors at Baskin Robbins and claiming that students either like or don’t like all ice cream based upon the results. Missing 20 out of 20 sight words indicates that the student does not know those 20 sight words. It does not mean that the student does not know the remaining 80. My Teaching Reading Strategies program assesses and provides instruction to remediate all 100 of the most frequently used sight words. That makes more sense.

Why have sight words as part of a screening and placement test in the first place. Knowledge of sight words is not a reliable indicator of reading difficulties. And why 20 test items when there are only 30 phonics sound-spellings (a much more reliable indicator). The ratio is completely out of whack. Plus, as any remedial reading teacher will tell you, the easiest reading remediation is memorizing those 100 words.

Phonics

“A total of 30 nonword items were developed, representing the full range of commonly taught phonics skills. All targets and distractors were nonwords or obscure English words that are unlikely to be known. In addition, all targets and distractors follow conventions of English spelling, and care was taken to avoid Spanish words, slang, and nonwords that sounded like real words.”

Criticism

While my Teaching Reading Strategies program includes the same sound-spellings as the 30 nonword items, my program includes 52 vowel sound-spellings and 50 consonant sound-spellings in the nonword format. Phonics tests are necessary as screening and placement assessments for reading intervention, but why not test everything that needs to be taught with corresponding activities and worksheets? The tests take only 12 minutes to give and can be graded on Scantrons® or Grade Cam®. Audio files are provided with the program. Why not check out these assessments yourself?

Finally, the little known fact about the READ 180 Next Generation program is that students who fail the Foundational Reading Assessment will need to be assessed and placed in another program: SYSTEM 44 Next Generation. This program is a separate program and is extremely expensive. The publishers claim that READ 180 and SYSTEM 44 can be taught concurrently in the same classroom, but none of our pilot teachers throughout our district is doing so. Fair to note that the Language!® Live program and Teaching Reading Strategies each provide the instructional resources to teach the full range of student pre-reading and reading needs within the same program.

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The Science of Reading Intervention Program

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Word Recognition includes explicit, scripted instruction and practice with the 5 Daily Google Slide Activities every reading intervention student needs: 1. Phonemic Awareness and Morphology 2. Blending, Segmenting, and Spelling 3. Sounds and Spellings (including handwriting) 4. Heart Words Practice 5. Sam and Friends Phonics Books (decodables). Plus, digital and printable sound wall cards and speech articulation songs. Print versions are available for all activities. First Half of the Year Program (55 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Language Comprehension resources are designed for students who have completed the word recognition program or have demonstrated basic mastery of the alphabetic code and can read with some degree of fluency. The program features the 5 Weekly Language Comprehension Activities: 1. Background Knowledge Mentor Texts 2. Academic Language, Greek and Latin Morphology, Figures of Speech, Connotations, Multiple Meaning Words 3. Syntax in Reading 4. Reading Comprehension Strategies 5. Literacy Knowledge (Narrative and Expository). Second Half of the Year Program (30 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Assessment-based Instruction provides diagnostically-based “second chance” instructional resources. The program includes 13 comprehensive assessments and matching instructional resources to fill in the yet-to-be-mastered gaps in phonemic awareness, alphabetic awareness, phonics, fluency (with YouTube modeled readings), Heart Words and Phonics Games, spelling patterns, grammar, usage, and mechanics, syllabication and morphology, executive function shills. Second Half of the Year Program (25 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program BUNDLE  includes all 3 program components for the comprehensive, state-of-the-art (and science) grades 4-adult full-year program. Scripted, easy-to-teach, no prep, no need for time-consuming (albeit valuable) LETRS training or O-G certification… Learn as you teach and get results NOW for your students. Print to speech with plenty of speech to print instructional components.

Get the SCRIP Comprehension Strategies FREE Resource:

Get the Diagnostic ELA and Reading Assessments FREE Resource:

Reading Mark Pennington, phonics, Read 180, reading assessment, reading instruction, reading intervention, reading programs, remedial reading, RTI, Teaching Reading Strategies

My district has decided to “speed pilot” two reading intervention programs for our middle schools and high schools: READ 180 Next Generation from Scholastic Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with new authors Kevin Feldman and Kate Kinsella and Language!® Live from Voyager Sopris with contributing author Louisa Cook Moats. I teach at a large middle school and we have one pilot teacher for each program. Training has been quite thorough, especially from the well-funded READ 180 reps.

Although I am the only reading specialist on staff, I decided not to pilot either of the two programs. However, I do have a vested interest in getting to know both READ 180 and Language!® DISCLAIMER: I am the author and publisher of my own assessment-based reading intervention program: The Science of Reading Intervention Program.

I do use my own program with a seventh grade support class, so I can compare programs and results with those of the students in the READ 180 and Language!® at the same school with the same placement criteria. I’ll not pretend to have created an experimental design to determine if there are statistically significant differences between my program and the others. Of course I am biased, but I can present a few observations and allow teachers to draw their own conclusions.

I decided to start my comparisons with the screening and placement assessments for each program. As a reading specialist, I’m always concerned about using assessments to deny or provide services. Plus, as a matter of equity I’m very invested in the placement process: I hate to see a child overlooked who needs to learn to read but I’m equally distraught to see a student misplaced into a program who does not need to be there.

I decided to start my analysis with the READ 180 program. Specifically, in this article I’m taking a look at the phonological awareness component from one of the two assessments in the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI): The Foundational Reading Assessment. The second assessment is the Reading Comprehension Assessment. In my first article on these two reading intervention programs, I noted my concern that no encoding (spelling) test was included as part of the screening and placement assessments for READ 180. Jane Fell Greene’s encoding test has always been part of the competing Language!® program.

I emailed Dr. Richard K. Wagner, author of the READ 180 assessment (originally developed as the iRead Screener for another program). I asked him “If you were to add a print component that would ameliorate some of the limitations of the computer-based format, what would that include? I was hoping that you would have added an encoding test and a timed fluency assessment at the students’ Lexile levels.

Rick kindly responded: “What you say makes sense.”

Now onto the specifics of what is actually on the READ 180 Foundational Reading Assessment. This computer-based assessment includes a total of 82 possible items, divided into three strands: Phonological Awareness, Letter-Word Identification, and Word Attack.

Let’s look at the first two of the three strands. In my next article I’ll tackle the word attack component. The Phonological Awareness Strand has 12 total items. First, let’s look at two definitions to get us on the same page:

Phonological awareness refers to a general recognition of speech sounds. “When that insight includes an understanding that words can he divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness” (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 51).

Phonemic awareness is the recognition that words are made up of speech sounds (phonemes) and that these phonemes can be segmented (pulled apart), blended (put together), or substituted, added, or subtracted from one word to the next to create new words. It also refers to the understanding that the phonemes combine to form distinct syllables and words.

It doesn’t take a reading specialist to understand that phonological awareness precedes phonemic awareness. However, what teachers need to know to properly screen and place students is student mastery of the basic phonemic awareness skills. This data we do not get from the Foundational Reading Assessment. If teachers have to assess for proper placement (we do), why not kill two birds with one stone and assess to inform instruction as well?

Three of the test items in the phonological awareness assessment measure students’ rhyme identification skills. Students see an image and hear a word read aloud. They then see three more images and hear three more words. One of the words matches the beginning, middle, or end sound of the first word, or rhymes with the word. The test design certainly makes sense, but why only three rhymes? Rhyming is a critical component of phonemic awareness and is one of the earliest developmental stages of pre-reading. Rhyming is usually taught at home, in nursery school, and in kindergarten.

If I were designing the assessment, I would include 10 rhymes: one for each of the five short and five long vowel sounds. That would be an assessment that would properly screen, help place, and ultimately provide useful data for the teacher to teach to… in other words, assessment-based instruction. Yes, that is the format for my Rhyming Assessment in my program. The test is a simple five-minute whole class audio assessment.

The balance of the Phonological Awareness Strand test includes students’ abilities to identify initial, final, and medial sounds (only three test items for each). These elements of phonemic isolation are important pre-reading skills, and teachers need to know exactly what their students do and do not know for both program placement and for instruction. My phonemic isolation assessment has 10 teachable components on the five-minute whole class audio assessment.

And, most importantly, why isn’t phonemic segmentation, phonemic blending, and syllable awareness part of the assessment? These kindergarten−first grade pre-reading skills are essential skills to assess. And, no, READ 180 does not include separate diagnostic assessments for these elements of phonemic awareness. My does. Each of these three assessments has the usual five-minute whole class audio assessment.

The second component of the Foundational Reading Assessment tests letter name and letter sound knowledge items. The test uses a sample of 5 items assessing lowercase letter name knowledge and 5 assessing uppercase. Last I checked, there are 26 letters in our alphabet. Additionally, 10 letter sound items are included.

Interestingly, the publishers have taken the step to test the validity of their assessments to those of the University of Oregon’s Dibels Next assessments; however, Dibels Next assesses all 26 upper case and lower case letters. Knowing which letters students know and don’t know allows the teacher to teach to those deficits. Again, the READ 180 program does not provide assessment-based instruction with its screening assessments. Sampling has its drawbacks; teachers need teachable data.

The little known fact about the READ 180 program is that students who fail the Foundational Reading Assessment will need to be assessed and placed in another program: SYSTEM 44. This program is a separate program and is extremely expensive. The publishers claim that READ 180 and SYSTEM 44 can be taught concurrently in the same classroom, but none of our pilot teachers throughout our district is doing so. Fair to note that the Language!® Live program and my program each provide the instructional resources to teach the full range of student pre-reading and reading needs within the same program.

READ 180 and Language!® use adaptive computer technology to teach individual student deficits. Technology is wonderful; however, there are limitations. Most teachers I know prefer to control what needs to be taught, when it needs to be taught, and how it needs to be taught—not trust the machine and a canned reading program to “fix ‘em.” This is especially important in teaching phonemic awareness. Since phonemic awareness is an auditory, not a visual skill set, the face to face teacher to student instruction is essential.

*****

The Science of Reading Intervention Program

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Word Recognition includes explicit, scripted instruction and practice with the 5 Daily Google Slide Activities every reading intervention student needs: 1. Phonemic Awareness and Morphology 2. Blending, Segmenting, and Spelling 3. Sounds and Spellings (including handwriting) 4. Heart Words Practice 5. Sam and Friends Phonics Books (decodables). Plus, digital and printable sound wall cards and speech articulation songs. Print versions are available for all activities. First Half of the Year Program (55 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Language Comprehension resources are designed for students who have completed the word recognition program or have demonstrated basic mastery of the alphabetic code and can read with some degree of fluency. The program features the 5 Weekly Language Comprehension Activities: 1. Background Knowledge Mentor Texts 2. Academic Language, Greek and Latin Morphology, Figures of Speech, Connotations, Multiple Meaning Words 3. Syntax in Reading 4. Reading Comprehension Strategies 5. Literacy Knowledge (Narrative and Expository). Second Half of the Year Program (30 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Assessment-based Instruction provides diagnostically-based “second chance” instructional resources. The program includes 13 comprehensive assessments and matching instructional resources to fill in the yet-to-be-mastered gaps in phonemic awareness, alphabetic awareness, phonics, fluency (with YouTube modeled readings), Heart Words and Phonics Games, spelling patterns, grammar, usage, and mechanics, syllabication and morphology, executive function shills. Second Half of the Year Program (25 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program BUNDLE  includes all 3 program components for the comprehensive, state-of-the-art (and science) grades 4-adult full-year program. Scripted, easy-to-teach, no prep, no need for time-consuming (albeit valuable) LETRS training or O-G certification… Learn as you teach and get results NOW for your students. Print to speech with plenty of speech to print instructional components.

Get the SCRIP Comprehension Strategies FREE Resource:

Get the Diagnostic ELA and Reading Assessments FREE Resource:

Reading, Spelling/Vocabulary Language Live reviews, Language!, Mark Pennington, phonemic awareness, Read 180, Read 180 reviews, System 44, Teaching Reading Strategies

As money has finally started to creep back into education, districts are now turning their attention and dollars into purchasing reading intervention programs. My district has decided to “speed pilot” two reading intervention programs for our secondary schools: Language!® Live is the re-vamped Language!® program from Voyager Sopris with new contributing author Louisa Cook Moats; and READ 180 Next Generation is the thoroughly revised offering from mega publisher Scholastic/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with new contributing authors Kevin Feldman and Kate Kinsella. At my middle school we have one pilot teacher for each program. Training has been extensive from these two eager publishers because our district, Elk Grove Unified, is the third largest district in California and a district-wide adoption would be quite a plum for either of the two companies.

I am not one of the pilot teachers; however, I am curious. So now my DISCLAIMER: I sell my own reading intervention program: The Science of Reading Intervention Program. I developed the program in three instructional settings: grades 4−6 as a district elementary specialist; middle school as a “support” teacher; and high school as a co-teacher of a remedial reading class with a special education teacher.

As my colleagues have been piloting, I’ve been able to log-in as a student and check out these two programs to compare to my own. A bold move given that my cost per class of 25 students is about $15 per student, whereas the cost per class for each of the two comparative programs is closer to that of a well-equipped Lexus. But, you get what you pay for… right? Well, you do get a lot of bells and whistles.

I’ll begin with the screening and placement assessments for the programs. First I’ll start with the READ 180 program. This article will begin to tackle just one of the two assessments in the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI): The Foundational Reading Assessment. The other assessment is the Reading Comprehension Assessment. As a reading specialist, I always gravitate to phonemic awareness, decoding, and encoding materials, so I’ll start there.

My first ah, ha was the lack of a spelling test as part of the screening and placement assessments. The Language!® program has one; my program has one. What gives?

I will say from my own 25+ years of teaching remedial reading that a student’s ability to encode (spell) certainly has helped me properly place students in instructional programs to target their individual needs. I would go as far as saying that a spelling test (Jane Fell Greene’s encoding test, the Qualitative Spelling Inventory developed by Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, and Johnson (2000), or my own comprehensive Diagnostic Spelling Assessment) provides essential information for program placement.

I did a little digging to see if a spelling assessment was part of the READ 180 companion program for beginning readers: SYSTEM 44. Nope. The Scholastic Phonics Inventory® has letter name recognition, sight word recognition, and nonword decoding, but there is no accompanying spelling test.

I decided to email the assessment author, Dr. Richard K. Wagner, and Rick kindly replied twice to my questions. Not to put words into his mouth, but I seemed to get support for my view that using spelling as a screening assessment makes sense.

Now READ 180 does provide individualized assessment and spelling instruction as part of its program, but not as part of its screening and placement. I will give my take (Spoiler Alert: It’s not the best Yelp review) on this spelling “instruction” in a related article.

But why use screening and placement assessments solely to determine whether students qualify for some form of tiered reading intervention? In other words why waste time giving separate placement and diagnostic assessments? Why give a test that provides nothing to teach to?

*****

The Science of Reading Intervention Program

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Word Recognition includes explicit, scripted instruction and practice with the 5 Daily Google Slide Activities every reading intervention student needs: 1. Phonemic Awareness and Morphology 2. Blending, Segmenting, and Spelling 3. Sounds and Spellings (including handwriting) 4. Heart Words Practice 5. Sam and Friends Phonics Books (decodables). Plus, digital and printable sound wall cards and speech articulation songs. Print versions are available for all activities. First Half of the Year Program (55 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Language Comprehension resources are designed for students who have completed the word recognition program or have demonstrated basic mastery of the alphabetic code and can read with some degree of fluency. The program features the 5 Weekly Language Comprehension Activities: 1. Background Knowledge Mentor Texts 2. Academic Language, Greek and Latin Morphology, Figures of Speech, Connotations, Multiple Meaning Words 3. Syntax in Reading 4. Reading Comprehension Strategies 5. Literacy Knowledge (Narrative and Expository). Second Half of the Year Program (30 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Assessment-based Instruction provides diagnostically-based “second chance” instructional resources. The program includes 13 comprehensive assessments and matching instructional resources to fill in the yet-to-be-mastered gaps in phonemic awareness, alphabetic awareness, phonics, fluency (with YouTube modeled readings), Heart Words and Phonics Games, spelling patterns, grammar, usage, and mechanics, syllabication and morphology, executive function shills. Second Half of the Year Program (25 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)

The Science of Reading Intervention Program BUNDLE  includes all 3 program components for the comprehensive, state-of-the-art (and science) grades 4-adult full-year program. Scripted, easy-to-teach, no prep, no need for time-consuming (albeit valuable) LETRS training or O-G certification… Learn as you teach and get results NOW for your students. Print to speech with plenty of speech to print instructional components.

Get the SCRIP Comprehension Strategies FREE Resource:

Get the Diagnostic ELA and Reading Assessments FREE Resource:

Reading, Spelling/Vocabulary anguage Live reviews, Language Live, Mark Pennington, Read 180, Read 180 reviews, Teaching Reading Strategies