The Results
Since 2020, we have served a lot of students both in private tutoring and as providers of specially
designed instruction for districts around Maine. In that time we have been able to see the power of intervention when it is designed with the student's unique profile in mind, and provided with enough intensity to change the way that learners process information.
525
Learners Served
23,345+
Hours of Instruction
The data below represents pre- and post-assessment results for students who completed a round of intensive, one-on-one structured literacy intervention at Pine State Learning. An average round of intensive intervention is between 90 and 120 hours of direct instruction, typically delivered over the course of several months at high frequency (so 2-4 hours daily).
Results are grouped by the skill area assessed and anonymized to protect student privacy.
Sight Word Recognition
+2.9
average grade-level gain
Word recognition, measured by the Slosson Oral Reading Test, reflects a student's ability to read real words in isolation and is reported as a grade-level equivalency.
Orthographic Targeted Intervention Changes Everything for Our Learners
With one round of intensive instruction, our students gained nearly two grade levels in sight word recognition. Incorporating direct orthographic instruction from the beginning of instruction makes a huge difference in how quickly word recognition automaticity and word reading fluency. Incorporating multi-sensory instruction that targets visual working memory with airwriting, is the foundational difference in our instruction.
Many students leave YEARS of tutoring only to be good decoders, with strong phonological awareness but limited sight word automaticity and oral reading fluency gains. Incorporating multi-sensory strategies that support orthographic processing early, right from the beginning of instruction, makes a huge difference in sight word recognition and oral reading fluency for our students.
Tapping or "finger spelling" are multi-sensory strategies that reinforce phonological awareness, and sound by sound, decoding. While they create fast decoding gains at first, they can limit overall sight word gains. Air-writing, challenges the visual working memory (orthographic processing) and builds our learners' phonological awareness and orthographic processing simultaneously; just the way their brains use them when reading fluently. We have taught students both ways, and see the huge difference this step makes.
Oral Reading Fluency: Correct Words Per Minute
Oral reading fluency measures reading rate alongside accuracy. A student who reads 40 cwpm is working so hard to decode each word that comprehension becomes nearly impossible. Research suggests 90+ cwpm at grade level is the threshold where reading begins to feel automatic enough to support understanding. That is why we incorporate oral reading as early as we can and practice with both decodable and organic text.
+39
average cwpm gain
+64
highest individual gain
Decoding
Decoding is the ability to translate written symbols into spoken language. It is the fundamental mechanical skill of reading: without it, a student is guessing from context and memory rather than truly reading. Decoding assessment uses nonsense words and increasingly complex syllable structures to determine whether a student has internalized the code, not simply memorized familiar words.
The students below arrived unable to decode beyond the simplest word structures. Through systematic instruction, they built the skill set to attack unfamiliar words independently, an ability that transfers to every word they will ever encounter.
From guessing to reading.
Decoding is a foundational step in learning to read for our students but it is just one part of the hierarchy of reading that we use to identify student needs, design learning plans, and monitor over the course of instruction.
Phoneme-Grapheme Mastery
English has approximately 50 phoneme-grapheme correspondences: the relationships between sounds and the letters or letter combinations that represent them. Mastery of these correspondences is what allows a reader to decode and encode any regular English word. Students are assessed on all 50 correspondences at intake and again at post-test.
Phoneme-grapheme automaticity is the first step in becoming a fast and automatic decoder. Our students need to know the sounds for these graphemes as fast as they know their names. They are the building blocks for all other literacy.