Cart
As a California Program Improvement District, we are required to offer reading interventions to students, and I want to use Read Naturally as the intervention curriculum for corrective reading. I have been asked to align Read Naturally with California state standards. Are there data that show a transfer of skills from reading fluency to the state test and to classroom performance?
It sounds like your school may be confusing apples and oranges. Read Naturally is not designed to be aligned with state standards any more than any other targeted intervention program is aligned to standards. Intervention programs are designed to address assessed needs of students who are scoring below and far below basic on the state assessments.
Much research has documented the critical relationship between fluency and general reading proficiency, including comprehension. You as a teacher do not need to prove this, since it is already clearly documented in the research literature.
When you look at STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting) results and determine that some students are not meeting state standards, then you must follow up to determine why. Curriculum-based measurements can help you determine whether fluency is one of their issues by comparing their fluency scores to national norms.
If you determine that students have a fluency deficit (they are in the 25th percentile or lower for their grade), then you must provide research-based intervention to improve their fluency, and Read Naturally is one of the best programs to accomplish this. It is research-based and validated to work quite well for students with assessed fluency needs.
Your fluency assessment will document whether Read Naturally is working for them.
However, note that most students will have other needs besides fluency, such as comprehension strategies, vocabulary, decoding, and writing. No one program is all things to all students.
— Kevin Feldman, Sonoma County Reading Director