How to Know Where Students are Struggling

Hey there friends,

This week we are so excited to share information on identifying student challenges.

One of the most challenging aspects of helping a struggling reader is understanding specifically where and why they are struggling.

Once we can understand the specific areas in which a student is breaking down and/or the cause of the breakdown we can begin providing targeted instruction and intervention.

We have a 3-Step Process we like to use (well technically it’s 4-Steps or more because the process will repeat itself but alas, we will stick with 3-Steps for the sake of illustration).

Assess | Design | Implement

I know, I know - it feels like we are testing our students to the max, but here’s the deal, if we don’t know where our students are struggling or what is the underlying cause of the struggle - we can’t support them as effectively as we should. This first step is truly critical. So what does this look like:

1 - Assess

When we are looking at reading specifically we want to assess students in the 5 Core Components of Reading. Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Reading Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension. You can use curriculum-based measures or standardized measures as long as the information that you receive provides you with information that you can use in your instruction. We like to use a combination of standardized measures (to see where our students are in comparison to their peers) as well as curriculum-based measures (to see how well they are doing on the specific concepts we’ve taught).

All the curriculum-based assessments we use are available in our Delivering SMARTER Intervention program if you’re interested in checking those out.

2 - Design

Once we have assessed our students and know where they are performing in each of the above-mentioned areas. We want to use that information to design our instruction. You can check out all about how we use assessments to guide intervention >>>here<<<.

3 - Implement

Once we have designed a plan around our assessment data, we begin implementing the plan we’ve designed and monitoring student performance. In this way, we can tell if the targeted/designed activities we’ve chosen are helping to close the gap. As soon as you begin targeting instruction in this way you will nearly ALWAYS see the gaps your students have begin to close (and it happens quickly). If they are not closing the gap then we need to go back to our data to see if there’s anything we’ve missed or need to dig deeper into.

It’s truly by completing this cycle that we can begin to truly understand where our students are struggling.

When we know WHERE they are struggling, we can provide appropriate supports. If all we know is that a student isn’t performing where they need to be - but we don’t know where the breakdown is, we are somewhat limited in our approach.

Having assessment and data to guide instruction is CRITICAL in closing the gap for struggling readers.

Let us know in the comments which assessments you are using to guide instruction. To make data tracking easy, be sure to grab our free Data Tracking System. This tool will help make data tracking easy and help you keep your session data organized.