In less than forty-two hours of one-on-one tutoring, participating elementary school students within the School District of Lancaster (SDOL), PA, raised their reading proficiency scores by an average of 1.14 grade levels.
The grade-equivalent reading scores for alternative education middle school students in the same school district jumped 1.52 grades in only 27 hours.
In another part of the Commonwealth, 9th grade students at Chester High School showed a 1.3 grade-level increase in 36 hours.
These quite successful programs are part of the Bright Sky Learning, LLC (BSL) Smart Way Reading and Spelling(TM) (SWRS) systematic and explicit phonics methodology. The elementary school program was a four-day-a-week activity, while the alternative education and high school tutoring sessions were conducted daily this past spring.
The elementary students within the SDOL increased their decoding skills from 18%, on average, to over 52%. Decoding is, in a simplistic form, the way in which a person recognizes that a written word makes certain sounds and the ability to correctly reproduce those sounds from seeing the written word.
"These are exactly the types of results Governor Rendell likes to see with his Educational Assistance Program funding," said Eric Moore, BSL Program Director.
"We are extremely gratified to see the results in both districts," Moore continued. "Working in coordination with education consultants from the Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN) and the school districts and individual schools, we were able to not only substantially increase student performance in our core programs of decoding skills and spelling," he added, "but also in comprehension and fluency."
The aforementioned results are part of the pre- and post-assessments conducted utilizing the Wide Range Achievement Test(C) 3 (PAR) reading exam and the Franklin Assessments Decoding Skills(C) test (Franklin Assessments, LLC).
In all, there were over 250 students attending Bright Sky Learning(C) reading programs within the two districts. At the SDOL elementary school, there were also Woodcock-Johnson(C) III (WJIII, Riverside Publishing) tests administered by members of PaTTAN, and results of the Broad Reading skills for the 96 students who were given the before and after WJIII tests showed the grade equivalent averages jumped even more, 1.86 grades.
In addition to the SWRS program, the BSL team utilized their proprietary Comprehension And Reading Enrichment(C) (CARE) program that aids in developing a student's comprehension and fluency level. The CARE portion of the program saw Reading Coaches working one-on-one with their student to increase language arts skills during a series of research-based exercises that utilized leveled DK Readers (Dorling Kindersley) for elementary students and Achieving Maximum Potential (AMP) high-interest level books from Pearson Learning for middle and high school students.
"All in all," Moore says, "the results speak for themselves. We are not only very proud but also extremely happy for the significant increase in decoding skills and reading levels that were achieved by the BSL Program students. This is what the company is all about -- helping students that need reading assistance."