Case Study: MetaMetrics and NWEA Tap Longtime Partnership to Tackle Challenge of Declining Proficiency
Literacy skills among school-age kids has been suffering for many years, even before the pandemic (which has only made the problem worse). Results of the 2018 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Study on Oral Reading Fluency are sobering—nearly two thirds of students were not reading at a proficient level. This was a call to action for many working in education: We must help students in the U.S. learn to read.
But where do you start when there are so many facets to the problem?
In 2020, we once again teamed up with NWEA, a partner for over 20 years, to leverage our collective expertise and innovate in the area we know best: measurement of student skills and knowledge. Why is this a critical component of teaching students to read? Because without information about where students are on their literacy journey, it’s impossible to tailor instruction for each student. One area worthy of further investigation was the pillar of literacy called oral reading fluency, or how well a student reads out loud. Research shows that this skill is an important component of comprehension, a requirement of becoming a proficient reader.
Here’s the challenge: The industry standard for measuring a student’s ability to read out loud was based on word correct per minute (WCPM), which, while ubiquitous, didn’t go far enough to provide an accurate assessment of student ability. WCPM is an important part of the foundation of pinpointing a student’s oral reading fluency but we realized that we could build upon it: the difficulty of the passage the student was reading needed to be considered as well. Wait, let’s let that sink in for a second. Up until this point, every student could read an entirely different passage when being tested! The issue is pretty obvious: If student A reads an easy passage and student B reads a difficult passage (given both are appropriate for the same grade level), Student A is going to probably score much higher in WCPM than Student B, even if their abilities are about the same.
How can you help kids progress as readers if you don’t have a reliable measure of their oral reading skills, especially when you are talking about a whole classroom, school, district, or state of students? The truth is, you can’t. This is where our work with NWEA leads to a relatively simple (in concept) solution. Keep reading to learn more about how our long time partnership with NWEA supports students’ literacy journey at the individual level.