The Predictive Assessment of Reading (PAR)

1. The Predictive Assessment of Reading (PAR) February 11, 2013 Carrie Malloy & Julie Smith

2. Literacy Long Term Goals

3. Engagement and Joy Story Time at Secca Story Time at Summit

4. History of the PAR • Developed out of 30 years of NIH-funded research designed to gain a better understanding of literacy development • How it unfolds in typical readers • How early intervention can ameliorate later difficulties

5. The National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, Put Reading First • Commissioned out of concern for the growing illiteracy rate in our country • A panel of research experts analyzed hundreds of literacy studies (a meta-analysis) • Their assessment of the research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction

6. Their Findings • Research Supports Five Essential Components of Reading Instruction: • Phonemic Awareness • Phonics • Vocabulary • Fluency • Comprehension

7. Phonemic Awareness • A child’s ability to recognize that spoken words are made up of individual speech sounds (phonemes) and that child can hear, count, and manipulate those sounds.

8. Listening for Sounds

9. Phonics • Understanding that there is a predictable relationship between speech sounds in our spoken language (phonemes) and the letters which represent them (graphemes). Often referred to as the “alphabetic principle” • Phonics instruction must be taught • Systematically (easiest concepts to harder) • Explicitly (to mastery) • Should begin no later than Kindergarten

10. Sounds and Symbols

11. Vocabulary • Development of stored information about the meaning and pronunciation of words • Developed indirectly through oral language and listening to enriched text read aloud • Developed directly through explicit and specific teaching of word meanings in context, dictionary skills, familiarity with word parts

12. Alfie and Annie Rose

13. Fluency • The ability to read text accurately, quickly, and with prosody. Studies demonstrate that practice and repetition leads to automaticity. • Activities for improving fluency include: • Monitored, repeated oral reading practice • Student-adult paired reading • Choral reading • Taped practice • Timed drills

14. Repeated Stories and Singing

15. Comprehension • The ultimate goal of reading. The following strategies have a firm scientific basis for improving text comprehension: • Teaching students to question, predict, self-monitor as they read • The use of graphic organizers • Teaching story structure • Summarizing and visualization strategies

16. Expressing What We Know

17. Understanding

18. Why the PAR? • Now that research can better shed light on how literacy develops, rather than waiting for children to fail, what can be done to: • Predict a child’s future reading outcome • Change the course of that outcome through focused, preventative instruction

19. What is the PAR? • The PAR is not an academic achievement test, but rather an early screening tool developed to assess a child’s skill on basic underlying processing skills which support literacy. These include: • Phonological Awareness • Letter Identification and High Frequency Single Word Reading • Rapid Naming (a measure of fluency/word retrieval) • Vocabulary • It is able to predict a kindergartener’s eighth grade reading ability with 97% accuracy.

20. What Can the PAR Tell Us About a Child? • Its results can: • Uncover patterns of uneven skill development • Identify early literacy and pre-literacy strengths and weaknesses • Provide insight regarding critical pre-reading skills, which can be supported or bolstered to change the course of a child’s future literacy outcome

21. A Look At How it’s Administered

22. Understanding The Results

23. Begin with the End in Mind