The Science of Reading for Educators

  Introduction You may have missed the news in North Carolina, but Senate Bill 387 , also known as the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021, was recently passed on April 9, 2021. There has been a great deal of debate and misunderstanding from various groups around the state regarding the passage of this bill. For the past two years, the North Carolina State Board of Education has taken up the issue of early literacy and teacher preparation programs in regards to literacy. The Prek-12 Literacy Instruction and Teacher Preparation Task Force, composed of educators and stakeholders around the state, examined current teacher preparation programs and the state of literacy in North Carolina, and the task force made recommendations to the NC State Board of Education based on their findings. You can read about the specifics in my previous blog posts What’s Happening in North Carolina Literacy and What is Read to Achieve . The current bill aims to align literacy instructional practices in the

Literacy Assessments Within a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework, decision making begins first with assessment. Through the assessments administered, problem solving teams are able to look at the overall “health” of a school by determining how many students are on target to meet grade level expectations versus how many students are not on target for success. This can help schools determine which elements of the core curriculum need to be supplemented or adjusted. Additional assessments can then be utilized to look at the overall performance of grade levels, classrooms, and individual students. There are multiple forms of assessment that are used as part of a comprehensive assessment system within a school, but the three most commonly used to make decisions as part of the problem solving process are universal screeners, diagnostic assessments, and progress monitoring. Universal Screeners A universal screener is designed to determine if a student is at-risk for reading dif