Summer Series - Tracking Reading Growth Without a Benchmark Assessment

What is the Summer Series?

A collection of listener favourites from the Structured Literacy Podcast to get you prepared for 2026.

Today's Episode

In this week's episode of the Structured Literacy podcast, I address the common challenge of tracking student reading progress. 

Are your students good readers, but poor spellers? If so, you are not alone. Spelling Success in Action addresses phonics, orthography, and morphology to give students a well-rounded understanding of how our language system works. 

Find out how you can help your students move beyond guessing and memorisation at https://www.jocelynseamereducation.com/spelling2

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Chapters

• 3:49 The Problem With Benchmark Levels
• 5:33 Moving To Decodable-Based Assessments
• 8:02 Screeners Of Risk, Not Grades
• 9:10 Why Build A New Framework
• 10:08 Introducing The Four-Part Tool
• 11:16 One-Page Milestones Overview
• 13:21 What The Tool Leaves Flexible
• 14:57 Beyond Phonics: Nuanced Milestones
• 16:46 From Decoder To Strategic Reader

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 2:31

Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, the place where we talk all things literacy and education. I'm Jocelyn and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this episode. I tried to maintain a mix of research driven information and practical know-how in all that I do, and the podcast is no exception. In today's episode, I'm addressing a question that comes up frequently. Without a benchmark assessment, how do we track student growth? And how do I communicate effectively with parents about their child's development? The other part of this picture is how do I choose a text for students to read if I don't have the levels? This episode coincides with the release of a brand new tool that I've developed to help you navigate understanding the progression of skills and knowledge as students learn to read, setting goals for reading, tracking growth, and communicating all of this with parents, other members of your team, and the students themselves. If you're a resource room member, the live Mastermind held the week that this episode airs in August 2024 provides additional details and guidance around reading development and using this tool. Of course, if you are listening after this date and are a resource room member, the recording is available to you along with the recordings of all other masterminds and courses run inside the Resource Room membership. But the tool is available to everyone, whether or not you are a member. You can find the download link in the show notes of this episode, season four, episode two. Before we get to the tool that I've created, let's talk about reading assessment and how our views on reading development have changed over time. For the longest time we relied on benchmark assessments from leveled reading schemes to help us assess and monitor student growth. The problem with these assessments is that the levels they assessed against didn't actually mean what we thought they did. Now I'm not going to say that they were completely useless. When I talk with teachers who are making the move away from benchmark assessment, they often say that they did get something out of them. They got to spend time with students one on one, and they got to make observations about particular reading behaviors that they could use to set goals. And that is all very fair and valid. It makes perfect sense. But benchmark assessments and the levels they presented were, and I'm sorry to put it like this, they were made up. There was no link to research, frameworks of reading development, or established theories at all. If you or your team is working through this particular issue right now, have a listen to season one episode seven of the podcast, why it's so scary to let go of benchmark assessment. For many schools, the move from benchmark assessment based on a leveled reading scheme involves an assessment based on a decodable text series. There are several around that involve assessing phonemographeme correspondences, word level blending, and text level reading. The text used align with the sequence of code and complexity set out by the series. These assessments are certainly a step up from the leveled text benchmark assessment. My concern though is that while the monitoring of phonemegrapheme correspondences and phonemic skills is wonderful and definitely a step in the right direction, teachers are still relying on a leveled text assessment of sorts to decide what children will read. Of course, the levels that come with decodable text respond to more up-to-date thinking about reading development and have a phonics focus rather than a sight word one. But are teachers actually building understanding of the full range of skills and knowledge developing readers need to progress in their learning? Maybe yes, maybe no. I'm not saying that if your school is using one of those assessment tools that you're doing something wrong, so please don't take it that way. What I am saying is that we need to acknowledge the strengths and limitations of all of the tools that we use. The framework and tool that I'm sharing with you today can be one part of your decision-making picture, but it won't be the only one. For bigger picture assessment and screening of risk, many schools are making the move to normed tools such as Dibbles and Acadiens, and there are others available as well. These tools are not assessments as in the way we usually think about assessments. They don't measure what the student has learned and give you a list. As such, they also don't give you a level or a score. They're screeners of risk. So if a student's scores are in the green zone, that doesn't mean that they get a C in year three. It means that if all goes well and progress continues at an appropriate rate, the student's risk of reading failure or difficulty is low. You might be wondering why I'd bother to create a framework and accompanying tool for supporting students through reading development at all when there are already assessments and screeners available. The reason that I developed this was because the assessments and screeners we currently have available aren't nearly nuanced enough, and beyond a few basics of learn this code and learn to blend, there isn't enough specific guidance for setting goals and fully communicating about a student's growth through reading. I also developed the tool because time and again conversations I was having with people included the question, but how do we decide what they read? Many of us are also in the tricky space of not really understanding when we can move students on from decodables. Because we don't want to cause harm to students, we may then be limiting their reading material to decodables for far too long and not helping them embrace less controlled text when they would actually be perfectly capable of managing them and when their introduction will actually continue to develop reading. Let's run through this thing that I've made and you can make up your own mind about whether it might add some value to your practice. Firstly, it's called From Phonics to Uncontrolled Text, an instructional framework for moving into, through, and past decodable text. This tool helps you to track students' reading development, set goals for next steps in learning, communicate with families and other team members, and build your understanding of the research foundations about the decisions we make about how to effectively support student reading development. The document is completely free and is organized in four sections. Section one provides a rationale for the tool and guidance on how to use it. Section two is a one-page overview of a student's early reading development, from first learning code to being able to go to the library and just choose texts of their choice. The third section breaks down each step in this journey and provides a brief explanation of why it's important and some fundamental information based in research. The final section of the tool is a full reference list with links to open access papers and sources so that you can follow up and evaluate what I've shared for yourself. I won't unpack the whole tool for you, you can download it and have a good look, but I will provide a quick overview so that you can decide whether it's something that might be useful for you and your team. The one-page overview is intended to be a simple record that follows a student from the beginning of school to the point where they can read uncontrolled text of their choice. It's divided into three sections with checkpoint boxes at three critical junctures. There are 16 milestones listed that relate to knowledge, skills, and reading behaviors. The idea is that as each milestone is reached, a box is coloured in and dated. This provides a wonderful visual for school staff, students and parents to be able to see where a student is up to in their journey and what specific goals are being worked on to help them reach the next checkpoint. In developing the milestones of learning to read, I used a variety of sources including the Hasbrook Tindle Fluency Norms, the Australian Curriculum General Capabilities, many research papers, and the writings of researchers and experts in the field. I haven't tried to reinvent any wheels with this tool or muddy the waters of school level decision making. Trying to align competing assessments and monitoring tools is a recipe for disaster. So I've avoided creating this situation for you in a couple of ways. Firstly, the tool doesn't list particular phonemographem correspondences for students to learn. Your school's chosen phonics program or approach will determine that focus. Instead, the code is discussed in general terms and you'll make decisions about that learning as works best considering the programs you already have in place. Similarly, I haven't listed specific high frequency words, as the focus of this learning will depend on many factors, including your phonics program and the decodable text series you're using. You also won't find any grade levels listed on the tool. It's good to know what reasonable expectations are for reading development in each grade, but ultimately, supporting students is about meeting them where they're up to. If a student is in grade five and still learning core phonemographing correspondences, that's the learning they need. Similarly, if a student has reached the end of year one and he's reading an unseen picture book or text at ninety words per minute with minimal errors, well, they need extending. Phonics and high frequency words are actually only a small part of the picture when it comes to reading development. Critical, but small. What I've attempted to do here is to provide the nuance of understanding and reading skills that's missing from existing tools. To this end, the reading milestones include things like the student stops and rereads when comprehension breaks down. That's the comprehension monitoring, which is necessary if students are to read for meaning. Another milestone is can sound out an unknown word and tidy up mispronunciation without guessing. That one is about set for variability, a critical skill in moving students on from fully decodable texts. Another one is attends to punctuation to support phrasing, including commas. This one is about prosody, that third element of fluency that we know is important. The way that I see this sitting is as an overarching guide to reading development. The one page overview would be like the cover page on a student's reading file, with your phonics and phonemic awareness assessment sitting behind it. Stanislaster Hahn says that it takes approximately three years for a student to develop the ability to automatically lift words from the page, moving from sounding out words to automatically recognizing them. Marianne Wolfe describes this change as a student moving from a skilled decoder to a strategic reader, and that journey of being a strategic reader and becoming that reader takes quite a long time. This tool covers the development from early reader to skilled decoder and ends when a student can read an elementary text that contains a range of sentence types, a larger number of high frequency words, polysyllabic words, a range of punctuation, and the full alphabetic code at 90 words per minute with minimal errors. This tool will not replace your phonics monitoring, phonemic awareness assessment, or normed screener. It simply gives you a big picture overview at the same time as sharing more nuanced milestones beyond phonics. And when a parent asks you, how is my child developing in reading? How do I know that there is growth there? You can whip this tool out and say, well, here are the milestones we're looking for Sally to achieve. Right now we're working on comprehension monitoring. So when things don't make sense, we have her stop, we want her to recognize that to go back and reread. We can be very specific about what we want parents doing with students at home. You can also use the documents as the basis for professional learning for your team. Remember the third section is a brief outline of why each milestone is important and contains links to research. You can spread the milestones out over a year and tackle them one by one as a team in short chunks to build your knowledge and capacity in making decisions for student learning. Think about this. If you did this, your team would be highly knowledgeable about early reading development by this time next year without the need to have days out of school or to overwhelm everyone. It's important to know how to use our programs and resources well. But it's more important that we know why we're doing what we're doing. It's only when we have knowledge, are confident with pedagogy, and know when to do what in response to student need that we can really move the needle on student outcomes in a big way. Programs are necessary, but we aren't going to get where we want to go without building teacher knowledge to. This episode has been a little different from the usual fair, but it might just have given you some food for thought about how we think about reading development, how we track it, and how we set goals. You can download from Phonics to Uncontrolled Texts, a framework for moving into, through, and past decodable text from the show notes of this episode at josnseyucation.com. And resource room members, if you're listening to this episode on the morning it's released, be sure to join me for the live mastermind this afternoon, where I unpack the rationale and practical elements of using the tool. If you're listening after the date of release, well the recording will be there waiting for you. Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you in the next episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast.

unknown: 16:02

Bye.