Guide to assess programmes
There are many programmes or resources out there that claim to be ‘evidence-based’. But how can you judge those claims?
This article by Kevin Whadell from Macquarie University will give you some pointers, as does this article by Lyon and Chhabra.
And in terms of assessing an approach or programme as being in line with the principles and approach of Structured Literacy, you need to ask yourself these questions:
Does it have a scope and sequence? Is the scope and sequence gradual enough to allow for a gentle increase in complexity? Does it cover all 44 phonemes of the English Language?
Is the instruction explicit? I.e. concepts and content is taught directly and students are not left to deduce or ‘pick things up’, or the instruction is not incidental to student initiated learning.
Is the instruction cumulative, allowing for repetition and consolidation of previous material?
Are there tools for assessing knowledge and identifying gaps in knowledge, particularly phonemic awareness?
Does the programme teach decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) together?
Does the programme extend into syntax, morphology and semantics?
Are there suitable decodable books (readers) available aligned to the scope and sequence?
Checklists & Validation
And if you are wanting a framework to help you assess whether your child’s school is providing reading instruction that follows a Structured Literacy Approach, the Right to Read Project has an incredible set of 5 checklists to help you assess the quality of their reading instruction. The checklists provide you questions to ask the school and then what might be encouraging signs or signs indicating there might be a problem. These checklists cover the big 5 areas identified by the National Reading Panel review of over 100,000 research studies in the year 2,000. They include: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
The Reading League also have a great Curriculum Evaluation Tool.
Jocelyn Seamer has a really good podcast and article on assessing whether a programme or resource is evidence-aligned. You can also download a handy checklist.
The UK Department of Education has also put out a Systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) teaching programme validation checklist. Sets out 16 essential core criteria that systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programmes need to meet.