If you’ve ever looked at your students’ reading data and wondered, “What am I actually supposed to do with this?”—this episode is for you.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why reading data often feels more like compliance than instruction
• How to actually use assessment data to guide day-to-day teaching decisions

Assessment is a constant in education—but too often, it’s disconnected from what happens in the classroom. In this conversation, we unpack one of the biggest misconceptions about reading data. As our guests explain, different types of assessments (screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring) are designed to answer different questions—and when we misunderstand that, instruction suffers.

We also explore what effective data-based decision making really looks like in practice. From thinking of instruction as a hypothesis to understanding why progress monitoring is one of the most underused tools in literacy, this episode offers a clearer, more actionable way to connect data to instruction. The goal isn’t more data—it’s better use of the data you already have.

Guests:

Dr. Jessica Toste, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and Editor of The Reading League Journal

Andrea Setmeyer, School Psychologist and Chapter Director at The Reading League

Show Notes

Resources mentioned:

The Reading League Journal

Measuring What Matters (Open Access Article)

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