Teacher Reactions to the Phonics Content Referenced Growth Reporting Prototype: Findings from Interviews
Link to Resource: Teacher Reactions to the Phonics Content Referenced Growth Reporting Prototype: Findings from Interviews
Authors: Nicolás Buchbinder, Olivia Cox, Erik Whitfield*
*Authors listed in alphabetical order, all contributed equally to the writing of this report.
In this qualitative study, we conducted a series of think-aloud interviews with in-service elementary reading teachers as they reacted to a prototype for reporting content-referenced growth (CRG) within a commercially available diagnostic assessment, Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Diagnostic. As in our prior work on content-referenced growth (Briggs et al., 2023), the design and structure of the reporting prototype is organized around a learning progression (LP). LPs afford rich opportunities for making sense of student growth by describing how a student's understanding of a 'big picture' concept in reading becomes more sophisticated over time with the right curricular and instructional support (Clements & Sarama, 2004; Lobato and Walters, 2017). Underlying any given LP is a theory-based hypothesis about how students develop knowledge and skill within the focal concept. However, adopting an LP approach to growth also requires adequate empirical support. In this report, we consulted an array of theories of word reading and reading development to define an LP about phonics and then validated the LP by exploring associations between its proposed levels and the difficulty of i-Ready Diagnostic items.