Learn how we gathered a passionate community of experts committed to reshaping education over the next 10 to 20 years. They became the AERDF Community Garden. Using AERDF’s Advanced Inclusive R&D process, we uncovered research opportunities connected to three focus areas that affect educational inequity: income inequality, sustainable teaching, and student-centered learning. This report explains the process we used to identify fundable initiatives and includes six example Opportunity Studies.
“We think about 40 to 50 percent of middle and high school students in America cannot perform this skill at the rate they need in order to be able to access reading comprehension,” said Kockler.
In this Education Week article, Rebecca Kockler, executive director of AERDF’s Reading Reimagined, draws the connection between students with insufficient decoding skills and poor reading comprehension, a problem she says researchers are discovering is much broader than previously thought.
She points to a landmark 2019 study that analyzed more than 30,000 students in 5th through 10th grade and found that those who scored below the ‘“decoding threshold”—meaning they were unable to decode grade-level text automatically, with accuracy and efficiency—made no significant growth in their reading comprehension ability over the next three years.
The first step to helping older students who are struggling to read is to diagnose the problem correctly, says Kockler, who recommends using an assessment specifically validated for older students, such as the Stanford University free tool Rapid Online Assessment of Reading (ROAR) developed by Dr. Jason Yeatman and his team.
Read the rest of the article to learn more
Dr. Temple Lovelace, executive director of Assessment for Good, a program with the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, and Dr. Susan Lyons, co-founder and executive director of Women in Measurement join The Future of Smart podcast. They are colleagues and leaders in the field of educational measurement, challenging fundamental assumptions that underpin how our dominant education system values, designs and uses assessments. Listen in for a conversation in which we explore why thinking differently about what and how we measure is critical to building human-centered systems of learning and education.
Often, when older elementary school students can’t read, it’s because they’re having trouble with a foundational skill, said Brandy Nelson, the academic director for the Reading Reimagined program at the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund.
“What is probably happening is the student has a decoding challenge,” she said.
Read on to learn what school systems need to do to support older students who have reading difficulties.