by Jason Rosvall, YESS Associate Director
2018-2019 School Year Literacy Program Report: SLVDT
YESS continues to focus on literacy as an ongoing school goal each year. With the recently completed 2018-19 school year, we have exciting results to share with you! YESS was able to hire a reading tutor with Land Trust monies that were approved by our Community Council. On behalf of YESS, I want to thank our council for their ongoing involvement and support of district and school endeavors.
So What Did We do?
Each Salt Lake Valley Detention student was assessed using an eighth-grade level passage of text. The student assessments were composed in a manner that student progress could be calculated using the same (or as close to the same) level of text, length of passages, complexity of words (lexile levels), similar classroom setting, etc. The goal with each assessment was to create an authentic measure of each student’s current progress at that time. The students practiced decoding, comprehension, and fluency skills within their own individual levels, during one-on-one tutoring sessions. Student progress levels were measured in fluency (Words Per Minute “WPM”), reading comprehension, and reading accuracy.
And What Were the Results?
A total of 457 reading assessments were conducted. 69 students (based on length of stay within the facility) continued to have two or more lessons. Of the sixty-nine students, 57 showed an increase in reading words per minute (WPM), 5 students witnessed a decrease and seven students remained even.
From the sample size of sixty nine students, an overall +14.8% increase was achieved!! The highest level of student achievement was registered at +85%, whereas the lowest decline was captured at -16%.
A special thanks goes out to Sean who worked so closely with the reading tutors and students, while amassing large amounts of data collection reflective of our literacy efforts.