Development of a Reading Foundational Skills Learning Progression
Link to Resource: Development of a Reading Foundational Skills Learning Progression
Authors: Olivia Cox and Derek Briggs
A number of foundational skills contribute to students’ growth toward skilled reading. Among those is phonics knowledge, or knowledge of the relationship between alphabetic symbols in print and sounds in spoken language. We examine how phonics knowledge develops from kindergarten through third grade by considering a theory of reading development known as orthographic mapping and by examining how the difficulties of i-Ready Diagnostic phonics items change from grade to grade. Our analysis reveals distinctions in item difficulty between kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, while second and third grade items tend to be more similar in difficulty.