How are your reading students doing? The answer lies, in part, in your own expert observation. But you also need more granular information—on every students’ individual skills and progress, and on how well your current program is meeting every students’ needs. In other words, you need data. Lots of data.
Literacy data, professional practice data, implementation data, student performance data—together, these measures can give you an honest reflection of students’ strengths, weaknesses, and progress. Data also allows you to personalize instruction, track development, and evaluate effectiveness. You can use it at the school or district level to measure implementation, and at the classroom level to refine teaching strategies.
When using data, though, there’s always a chance it will show that your current curriculum is not meeting student needs. The upside? It also gives you the evidence you need to make the case for a change.
And if you shift to a program grounded in the Science of Reading, data will—you guessed it—keep guiding your decisions, helping you make sure that the change is well-received, durable, and effective.
But first, you need to make sure your data is up to the task.
Getting your data ducks in a row
Before you can determine whether you need a new literacy curriculum, you have to know exactly where your students stand. Baseline literacy data tells the story of your current reality and provides the framework for measuring future success.
Start with the key foundational skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Then ask a few questions about your current data practices:
- Do we have skill-level data aligned to the Science of Reading to determine differentiated support?
- Are we using literacy data to drive instructional decisions?
- Are we collecting data consistently across classrooms? How about across the district or school?
- Are observational methods, including listening to students read, part of our assessment?
Once you can answer yes to all four, your data is ready to talk. Here’s what to look out for.
The Five Signals
Signal 1: Students who start the year on track aren’t staying there.
A helpful benchmark here comes from the 95% rule from Effective Universal Instruction: An Action-Oriented Approach to Improving Tier 1 by Kimberly Gibbons, Sarah Brown, and Bradley C. Niebling. It goes like this: If 95% of students who begin the year at benchmark remain at benchmark by the end of the year, your core literacy program is likely effective. If fewer than 95% of students who started the year on track are staying on track, that’s a strong signal that your current core program may not be meeting students’ needs, and that it may be time to explore a new one.
This is the data conversation to bring to your committee. It’s also a question involving your Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). Universal screening data is essential for evaluating how well your MTSS is working, and a strong MTSS focuses on all students so that each of them can access high-quality instruction.
Signal 2: Teachers are filling gaps on their own.
Start by identifying all the resources currently being used to support literacy instruction across your district or school. If that inventory shows teachers pulling together new resources to meet students’ needs, that’s a sign your instructional materials aren’t meeting those needs on their own. Teachers need materials that do meet needs, and that give them the tools to be effective regardless of experience level.
Signal 3: Practices and resources vary from classroom to classroom.
Professional practice data gives you the full picture of what’s happening in classrooms. Observations and practice surveys show you how teachers teach reading and which literacy instructional methods they use. Your resource inventory shows you which materials they rely on. If methods and materials look strikingly different from classroom to classroom, that’s a sign literacy instruction isn’t consistent across your district or school. Instructional resources used consistently across classrooms, and the district or school, can help close that gap.
Signal 4: Your foundational skills sequence isn’t clearly defined.
Review your current resources for a clearly articulated scope and sequence for foundational skills, including phonological awareness and phonics. If you can’t find one, or if literacy instruction isn’t knowledge-rich and aligned across grade levels, that’s a sign your current resources may not be grounded in the Science of Reading. Students need instruction built on both a clear foundational skills sequence, and knowledge-rich instruction that’s aligned from grade to grade.
Signal 5: Your systems aren’t aligned to the Science of Reading.
A professional learning inventory shows what opportunities are currently available and how well they align with the Science of Reading. An analysis of policies, structures, and procedures does the same for how reading instruction is set up. Knowledge surveys measure staff understanding of the Science of Reading evidence base—along with their willingness to change. If those supports aren’t aligned, that’s a sign your system as a whole isn’t yet set up for Science of Reading instruction. Aligning professional learning, policies, and structures is part of that shift.
This data also helps you start planning. With it, you can identify competing initiatives to deprioritize and curate resources that explain the Science of Reading to stakeholders and help build their buy-in.
Spotting the signals is the first step.
If several of these signals ring true, you may be in what we call the exploration stage: investigating whether a new literacy curriculum is needed, gathering supporting evidence, and beginning to build shared motivation for change.
Data keeps guiding the way from there. When you test new programs, pilot data helps you evaluate and choose. Once a new curriculum is in place, implementation data shows how classrooms are applying it, and student performance data shows whether students are mastering the content. And the data you collect in the early stages remains essential as the Science of Reading takes hold across your school or full district.
Chart your course with Data as Your Compass.
Our ebook Data as Your Compass: Leading the Shift to a New Literacy Curriculum is for anyone in a leadership or decision-making role with the power to drive curriculum change in their school or district. It walks through each stage of the journey, from exploration and adoption to implementation, full operation, and sustainability. For each stage, you’ll find the literacy data to collect, the key questions to ask, and a printable action checklist to help you assess your readiness before moving on.
Download Data as Your Compass.
