School district enriches reading programs with Istation software

by Philip A. Janquart

 The ability to succeed is rooted in one’s ability to read.

 There are exceptions in everything but if a child can’t read, their future is typically very bleak. 

 It is, in large part, why the Weiser School District decided to partially use federal learning loss funds for an educational tool called “Istation,” which was implemented at Pioneer Elementary and Park Intermediate schools about a year ago.

 First developed in 1998, the multifaceted software offers innovative reading, math, and Spanish programs that immerse students in game-like educational technology that inspires them to learn, according to the company’s website.

 Within the District, however, educators are utilizing Istation’s assessment component to track and monitor students’ reading skills, allowing them to more efficiently provide growth strategies to help those who are struggling and further challenge those who excel.

 Nationally normed Istation’s Indicators of Progress (ISIP) measure student growth with computer-adaptive diagnostic and screening programs.

 It’s a win-win for everyone, Park School Principal Angie Halvorson updating the District on the program’s status at a recent regular meeting.

 A year after its implementation, Halvorson told trustees that the program was well worth the investment.

 She reported that 87 percent of fifth grade students are on target to meet annual growth, with 90 percent of fourth graders moving toward annual growth.

 “We are assessing at Park and Pioneer every month and it’s on the computer, so all the kids can log in at the same time,” Halvorson told the Weiser Signal American. “It takes anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes. And, for our students who struggle, or who may not be demonstrating the growth we want them to, or maybe they are exceeding expectations, but they still need to grow, too, we can provide or ask them to take on-demand assessments so we can monitor their growth. Our overarching goal, our mission, is to inspire all students to learn with purpose and part of that is making sure that all of our students grow at least a year, in a year, so this assessment allows us to check that.”

Istation

 Istation assesses students’ vocabulary, comprehension, and reading fluency. Students who are shown to be struggling take part in “interventions,” teachers taking appropriate steps to address specific problems on an individual basis.

 “Traditionally, we would sit a student down and listen to them read for one minute. We would tell them to do the best that they can and if they got stuck on a word, we would tell them and monitor their fluency,” explained Halvorson, who spent 17 years as a reading specialist. “With the Istation, they provide us with what’s called a text fluency score and that is a kind of inferred reading fluency, but it’s based on how long it takes them to read those passages and answer the comprehension questions.

 “So, it’s a measure of how much time they are spending on those assessments, and it generates an approximate text fluency for us, so we can use that to target kids who might be struggling and then we can pull those kids aside and read with them one-on-one to look at their errors and see what’s happening. It empowers teachers to identify problems early on so students stay on track.”

 Children typically learn how to read between kindergarten and the second or third grade before they transition into reading to learn, but there are students who are still learning to read at that point, Halvorson said.

 Decades ago, children who struggled with reading might not be identified so quickly.

 “We need to have tools that help us with that, to pinpoint where we need to spend our time and effort,” she said. “But it’s not just about our kids who are struggling; it’s about all of our kids and making sure that they are growing in the school year so we can meet their needs wherever they are.”

Living illiterate

 A brief video called “Timebomb” produced by internationally recognized author and presenter Mike Mattos underscores the effects of illiteracy in the U.S., including poverty wages and welfare numbers. See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEUxeea7NdQ.

 Halvorson added that illiteracy can also lead to crime.

“One of the things that has been quite telling in our nation for a long time is that, in places like the state of California, they use the percent proficient of kids’ reading at third grade to determine how many beds they need in prisons,” she said. “So, there is a huge correlation between kids’ ability to read by third grade and what their future looks like. In the grand scheme of things, our kids don’t have time to waste, and we don’t have time to waste; we have to get them reading and everybody is working very hard to do that. 

 “These assessment measures provide us with the opportunity to check in and make sure that what we are doing is effective so that we can make changes sooner rather than in a traditional sense, where we are going to teach all year and hope they’ll learn something, and we’ll find out at the end of the year, or we are going to teach this entire unit and I’m going to test you at the end of the unit and then I’ve got to move on, so I hope you can catch up. That was the more traditional approach to learning, so the model of assessing often and adjusting as we go is just best practice in education.”