Education and demonstration – Language – Spelling – phonics – word recognition – or sentence formation
Reexamination Certificate
2002-04-17
2004-01-13
Rovnak, John Edmund (Department: 3714)
Education and demonstration
Language
Spelling, phonics, word recognition, or sentence formation
Reexamination Certificate
active
06676413
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to literacy programs. The invention is particularly, but not exclusively, useful for preventing illiteracy and achieving grade-level literacy in substantially all members of a predetermined set of students, such as those students in kindergarten through third grade (K-3).
2. Description of Related Art
In 1965 the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) initiated a research program on reading. A division of the National Institutes of Health, NICHD research focuses on protecting the health and welfare of our nation's children. They maintain the key factor in a child's health and well being is their education—particularly, and instrumentally, their ability to read in order to be successful in school and in life. Failure to read is associated with juvenile crime, teenage pregnancy, and dropping out of school. Illiteracy is as disabling to a child as any of the diseases against which we regularly inoculate.
Illiteracy is a social, economic, and health issue that affects children throughout our nation, but particularly impacts the poor. Only 14% of children from low-income families can read. These children will disproportionately end up unemployed and in prisons. 75% of unemployed adults are illiterate, 85% of juvenile offenders, and 60% of prison inmates. Illiteracy costs America over $250 billion a year.
While illiteracy is a costly American problem, it is not an inevitable one. Research over the past 30 years from NICHD proves that 95% of children can learn to read if taught early, deliberately, and effectively. The present system is explicitly built to achieve this 95% goal and designed as a primary prevention system to identify all children in a predetermined group at risk for reading failure, to provide each one immediate intervention, to monitor that intervention, and to continue the intervention until every child is on track to become a reader. The system is designed to find and remediate the problem of illiteracy at its origin—in the critical developmental years—and then to irradiate it. The ability to ensure all literacy-capable children in America can read through a primary prevention system constitutes an economic, social, and health safeguard of significant proportion.
Learning to read is the single most important factor determining a child's success in school and progress in life. Reading skills established in the first years of school enable students' success throughout school and afterwards.
Previous literacy programs utilized written tests to measure reading skills in students. Such tests are administered at the beginning and end of the school year. In some cases, the teachers whose students are being tested may devise tests. Commercial tests are administered and the results reported for tabulation. Some weeks or months later, the results are delivered to the teacher. This type of program presents statistical measures of the results of administering those tests, as a way of documenting the overall reading level of the tested students at two points in time. Reports are given on the performance of all students tested; individual results are reported normatively; i.e., compared to other students. Such programs do not provide specific recommendations for improving the skills of lower-performing students. Additionally, such programs are not repeated throughout the school year to monitor the progress of students toward grade-level literacy.
Previous literacy programs have reported on the reading skills of students, but they have not provided for reporting on the performance of teachers in the improvement of those reading skills. Those programs that provide general suggestions for remedial instruction activities for students do not collect information on the application of those suggestions, to allow administrators to evaluate the teachers, as well as the students.
Previous classroom management systems for monitoring the grades of students throughout the school year have provided spreadsheets to enter traditional letter grades (i.e., A, B, C, D and F) for individual students. These grades are from the tests administered by the teacher in the normal course of the school year. The grades are collected throughout the school year, and the grade history of individual students can give the individual progress of those students. However, because the tests are not standardized, the results collected by one teacher cannot be aggregated with the results from other teachers.
As such, many typical literacy programs and classroom management programs suffer one or more shortcomings. Many other problems and disadvantages of the prior art will become apparent to one skilled in the art after comparing such prior art with the present invention as described herein.
BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides one minute standardized oral fluency measures for determining the level of development of critical reading skills in individual students. These measures are 92% predictive of where a student will be at the end of the year absent intervention. Teachers can enter test results directly into the system and receive summary results immediately. The system may be made available over the Internet to teachers in any location. The oral fluency measures are repeated throughout the school year for lower-performing students, to allow monitoring of those students' progress toward grade-level literacy. Specific recommendations of curriculum and instruction time may be made for each student, based on the measured reading skills of that student. The test results for individual students may be aggregated to provide summary reports for all students in a classroom, a school or a school district.
More specifically, aspects of the invention may be found in a method and system for preventing illiteracy and achieving grade-level literacy in substantially all members of a predetermined set of students. The method contains the steps of administering standardized oral fluency measures to the students in the predetermined set of students. The results of those measures are recorded in a database and a standardized predictive measure of the current level of literacy of individual students is calculated. A report is presented for each student showing the student's recorded results; a calculated measure of literacy; and recommendations of curriculum and instruction time, based on the student's calculated measure of literacy. The report may also include a timeline plot of the student's results through the school year, showing his/her progress toward grade-level literacy, which may also be plotted on the timeline. A schedule is also determined for each student, also based on the student's calculated measure of literacy, for repeating the steps of the method during the school year, in order to achieve grade-level literacy in substantially all members of the predetermined set of students.
Aggregate reports may be prepared, showing a summary of the progress of all students in the predetermined set of students. Where the predetermined set of students is all students in a school district, aggregate reports may be prepared for a subset of students in the district: e.g., all students in a single classroom, all students at a given grade level within a school, all students within a school.
Teachers may be surveyed for information regarding their activities in implementing the method of the present invention, and a report presented on that information, including recommendations to improve the teacher's implementation of the method. Information regarding professional development activities may be collected and reported on. Activities may also be specified for the supervisors of the teachers, and surveys used to collect information about the performance of those activities by the supervisors. Reports can be prepared on the information collected on such supervisory activities and recommendations of supervisory activities to improve the implementation of the method. D
Best Emery Randolph
Black Stephan Randal
Hunter Matthew Peter
Nowakowski Jeri A.
Hulsey III William N.
Hulsey, Grether, Fortkort & Webster LLP
Rovnak John Edmund
Voyager Expanded Learning, Inc.
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