Assessing COVID Slide — from a Distance?
Quickly and remotely assess reading in grades 3–12
to mitigate the COVID Slide
By Joyce Whitby, @jwhitby1, joyce@innovations4education.com
“…data from the last formal reading assessment of your students is likely to be well over a year old…!”
One thing everyone can agree on is that Back to School 2020 is chock full of UNKNOWNS. Though instructional models will vary from state to state and even district to district, one thing is becoming very clear — we will have to do things differently.
Consider this — data from the last formal reading assessment of your students is likely to be well over a year old. And of course your students spent spring 2020 working independently, with unclear outcomes, followed by a long hot summer off. In fact, greater than 50 million students in the United States alone have spent the past several months not sitting in class, not studying with friends, not working through math problems with a teacher by their side.
An article posted by CNN in May 2020 paints a grim picture. “experts said academic losses could be particularly problematic for grade school students who should be in the process of laying critical foundations of reading, writing, and math skills that should be built on for years to come — potentially robbing a generation of students of vital stages of learning.
Inequity. The situation is further complicated by a vast range of conditions, which add to an already inequitable field including: students in lower grades missing critical developmental milestones, children with special needs, and students in low socioeconomic communities without access to technology or resources commonly found in affluent neighborhoods. Parents with the means to do so, have provided a rich array of resources including: 1:1 technology and high bandwidth, tutors, virtual camps, and a new phenomena — learning pods. These parents stepped in when schools closed, to help their children, because they could. Of course, parents without the means were unable to do so, and made due with instruction available from public education teachers, who were unexpectedly thrust into remote teaching, oftentimes with inadequate training or expertise resulting in a divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ widening.
If we could magically see the impact this COVID Slide will have on the future of our students, we would likely ask, “Why didn’t we do something about this at the time?” or “Why didn’t someone just use basic technology to provide simple accommodations that would help all students?” And we would be right. We certainly can’t erase COVID Slide, but we can stand up right now and provide basic support to our most vulnerable students that can help get them back on the right course. So where do you start?
Why can’t Johnny read? — Age old question, new answer…
New from ETS ReadReady™ — Just in time reading diagnostic for the most challenging Back to School season ever!
This fall, more than ever, teachers need quick interim reading-diagnostic data to identify areas of COVID Slide … This fall Teachers need ReadReady™, a reading diagnostic from ETS that is delivered by Capti Voice™.
Best of all, ReadReady supports your existing reading interventions, so that there is no need to adopt a whole new reading series!
Formerly known as RISE, ReadReady is a research-based, cloud based assessment, which provides real-time data to help teachers identify areas to target reading intervention in minutes, not days. Consistent with the National Reading Panel’s conclusions and recommendations, ReadReady evaluates six, key components of reading: Word Recognition, Vocabulary, Morphology, Sentence Processing, Reading Efficiency, and Reading Comprehension for students in grades 3–12.
ReadReady can be administered in multiple settings remotely or in person, for a total of 45–60 Minutes in overall duration. Educators really like the nuanced Information provided, that helps them plan out instruction for struggling readers. In the words of a teacher from Baltimore Public Schools, ReadReady “allowed us to find where students were struggling, group them, and provide targeted instruction.” Best of all, ReadReady supports your existing reading interventions, so that there is no need to adopt a whole new reading series. More importantly, when Capti Voice is added, it immediately provides an assistive technology designed to remove barriers to comprehension for struggling readers wherever they are, in school or remote.
Together Capti Voice with ETS ReadReady function as the “AAA for teachers” helping them Assess, Accommodate, and Accelerate reading.
Capti Voice is a ubiquitous tool that gives students access to numerous supports and customizations to help build their vocabulary, comprehension, organization skills, and more. Capti Voice can be customized for each student to meet their unique needs, and it provides an array of accommodations to help learners consume content, which might otherwise be beyond their reading level. Teachers can literally use Capti Voice to create playlists and assignments of their tried and true reading interventions. Students can then listen to that content, at their own speed, and use invaluable tools to define words, highlight important passages, and even translate into their primary language. Capti has been shown not only to accommodate reading, but also to dramatically accelerate students’ grade level in reading; and an improvement in reading comprehension also causes significant gains in math and sciences.
This fall, our first priority is to quickly understand just how much and in what areas COVID Slide has impacted students. The next step is to help students read and understand grade level content while working independently. ReadReady and Capti Voice work hand in hand to provide teachers with insight into each student’s needs, tools they need to support reading, and an easy path to improve reading comprehension and accelerate learning. Together Capti Voice with ETS ReadReady work as the “AAA for teachers” helping them Assess, Accommodate, and Accelerate reading. And in these most uncertain times, teachers need all the help they can get.
