Page 11 - S44 Compendium

OVERVIEW The Reading Inventory and The Phonics Inventory
The Reading Inventory1 is a comprehension measure based on the Lexile Framework® for Reading developed by MetaMetrics and now in wide use by schools with students at all levels of pro ciency. The Reading Inventory Lexile score is often the rst indication that a student is a candidate for System 44. Intervention Solutions Group recommends that students who score below 400L on The Reading Inventory in elementary school
or 600L at the secondary level be administered The Phonics Inventory2, which provides a more nuanced assessment of the root cause of reading dif culty and a corresponding prescription for appropriate reading intervention.
The Phonics Inventory was designed to measure uency for two word-level reading skills: phonological decoding and sight word reading. Phonological decoding uency is assessed by the speed and accuracy with which pronounceable nonwords are decoded. Sight word uency is assessed by the speed and accuracy with which high-frequency words are read.
While The Phonics Inventory measures both uency (i.e., speed and accuracy) and accuracy for sight words and nonwords, uency is the more critical measure because it frees the reader to attend
to comprehension. A uent response must be accurate as well as suf ciently fast. To get credit for a uent response to an item, the response has to be accurate and the total response time (latency) cannot exceed the threshold time. Having a score— uency—that combines accuracy and speed of responding is better than one that is based only on speed or accuracy. With uency scores, each item contributes to the differentiation of students who have decoding problems from those with adequate decoding. Fluency scores can be reported as raw scores, as well as by percentile rankings.
In the fall of 2010, the screener version of The Phonics Inventory was upgraded to incorporate
three alternate forms for screening and progress monitoring purposes. Each form of The Phonics Inventory is administered individually via a personal computer in approximately 10 minutes.
The Phonics Inventory has undergone extensive testing, which provides evidence that The Phonics Inventory Fluency Scores are reliable and valid. Two types of reliability were measured for The Phonics Inventory: 1) internal consistency reliability refers to the degree to which all items in a test measure the same thing; and 2) alternate form reliability refers to the degree to which the different Phonics Inventory tests are equivalent. In both cases, the magnitude of these results supports both the internal consistency of The Phonics Inventory and the equivalence of the three test forms. The validity analyses indicate that all classi cation statistics meet the highest standard of acceptability. Content-description (content) validity refers to the examination of the content of the test
to determine whether it is a representative sample of the behavior domain that is being assessed.
For further information about criterion-prediction and construct identi cation validity research, please see The Phonics Inventory Technical Manual, available online at hmhco.com/system44.
Table 1: The Phonics Inventory Decoding Status and Placement Recommendations
Levels
Results
Placements Should Include
PRE-DECODER
Student shows no mastery of the alphabetic principle.
Tier III: Foundational reading intervention including alphabetic principle and phonemic awareness.
BEGINNING DECODER
Student shows mastery of basic letter recognition, usually consonants.
Tier III: Explicit phonics instruction starting with simple consonant-vowel- consonant (CVC) patterns.
DEVELOPING DECODER
Student shows emerging word- building skills with mastery of basic word structures.
Tier III: Explicit phonics instruction starting with consonant blends.
ADVANCING DECODER
Student shows adequate mastery of decoding skills.
Tier II: Text-based reading with direct support in building vocabulary, reading comprehension, and uency with connected texts.
1 Prior to 2015, The Reading Inventory was known as the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI). 2 Prior to 2015, The Phonics Inventory was known as the Scholastic Phonics Inventory (SPI).
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