This professional resource provides strategies for developing a personalized understanding of how the word analysis process works. Topics to help learners become proficient readers include phonics, structural analysis, alphabet knowledge, sight words, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, context clues, fluency, and special instructional needs of English language learners. Also provided is a unique and important focus on rich children's literature as a key component of word analysis instruction. This resource supports the Common Core State Standards.

Practical, effective, evidence-based reading interventions that change students' lives Essentials of Understanding and Assessing Reading Difficulties is a practical, accessible, in-depth guide to reading assessment and intervention. It provides a detailed discussion of the nature and causes of reading difficulties, which will help develop the knowledge and confidence needed to accurately assess why a student is struggling. Readers will learn a framework for organizing testing results from current assessment batteries such as the WJ-IV, KTEA-3, and CTOPP-2. Case studies illustrate each of the concepts covered. A thorough discussion is provided on the assessment of phonics skills, phonological awareness, word recognition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Formatted for easy reading as well as quick reference, the text includes bullet points, icons, callout boxes, and other design elements to call attention to important information. Although a substantial amount of research has shown that most reading difficulties can be prevented or corrected, standard reading remediation efforts have proven largely ineffective. School psychologists are routinely called upon to evaluate students with reading difficulties and to make recommendations to address such difficulties. This book provides an overview of the best assessment and intervention techniques, backed by the most current research findings. Bridge the gap between research and practice Accurately assess the reason(s) why a student struggles in reading Improve reading skills using the most highly effective evidence-based techniques Reading may well be the most important thing students are taught during their school careers. It is a skill they will use every day of their lives; one that will dictate, in part, later life success. Struggling students need help now, and Essentials of Understanding and Assessing Reading Difficulties shows how to get these students on track.

This manual is a collection of resources for assessing and instructing elementary grade students in word analysis in such areas as phonics, syllabication, sight words, context clues, emergent literacy, and in spelling. In addition to providing an overview of word analysis skills and strategies,Building Words presents virtually everything, except actual books, that a teacher would need to implement a high-quality, effective word analysis program. This text takes a practical, hands-on approach offering a wide variety of tools teachers will find easy to use. Samples lessons encourage students to build on what they know and to analyze words independently. Students practice and apply their skills using the exceptional resources offered.

Although curriculum-based assessment (CBA) has been on the horizon for a number of years, there has been a need for a practical, classroom-based approach for its implementation. This second edition is a major revision and update that offers practical and specific methods for developing and using CBAs in an educational setting. It gives educators a highly specific, step-by-step approach to building CBAs in the area of reading word recognition, reading comprehension, content reading, mathematics, and written expression. Each chapter offers detailed, easy-to-read, and easy-to-follow instructions for the assessment construction process. To further clarify the process, extensive examples are given in table format. A unique feature of the text is the manner in which the author illustrates the principles of CBA by providing a case study on one student which is referred to in each chapter. Its formative assessment approach gives the teacher additional, detailed information about studentsOCO performance, which, in turn, should guide the type of instruction designed and implemented, ultimately leading to higher performance on summative outcome measures. Addition-ally, detailed information is provided on subject area CBA construction, the creation and implementation of a district-wide CBA system for response-to-intervention, and how to use IDEA'S response-to-intervention in student evaluation."

Recognizing the characteristics of children with learning disabilities and deciding how to help them is a problem faced by schools all over the world. Although some disorders are fairly easily recognizable (e.g., mental retardation) or very specific to single components of performance and quite rare (e.g., developmental dyscalculia), schools must consider much larger populations of children with learning difficulties who cannot always be readily classified. These children present high-level learning difficulties that affect their performance on a variety of school tasks, but the underlying problem is often their difficulty in understanding written text. In many instances, despite good intellectual abilities and a superficial ability to cope with written texts and to use language appropriately, some children do not seem to grasp the most important elements, or cannot find the pieces of information they are looking for. Sometimes these difficulties are not immediately detected by the teacher in the early school years. They may be hidden because the most obvious early indicators of reading progress in the teacher's eyes do not involve comprehension of written texts or because the first texts a child encounters are quite simple and reflect only the difficulty level of the oral messages (sentences, short stories, etc.) with which the child is already familiar. However, as years go by and texts get more complex, comprehension difficulties will become increasingly apparent and increasingly detrimental to effective school learning. In turn, studying, assimilating new information, and many other situations requiring text comprehension -- from problem solving to reasoning with linguistic contents -- could be affected. Problems with decoding, dyslexia, and language disorders have attracted more interest from researchers than have specific comprehension problems and have occupied more room in specialized journals. Normal reading comprehension has also been a favorite with researchers. However, scarce interest has been paid to subjects who have comprehension difficulties. This book is an attempt to remedy this situation. In so doing, this volume answers the following questions: * Does a reading comprehension problem exist in schools? * How important and widespread is the problem? * Is the problem specific? * How can a reading comprehension difficulty be defined and identified? * Does the "syndrome" have a single pattern or can different subtypes be identified? * What are the main characteristics associated with a reading comprehension difficulty? * When can other well-identified problems add to our understanding of reading comprehension difficulties? * Which educational strategies are effective in preventing and treating reading comprehension difficulties? * What supplementary information can we get from an international perspective?