AMany of this year’s third-graders also missed key opportunities to become stronger readers, said Jessica Sliwerski, CEO of Open Up Resources, a nonprofit curriculum provider, and founder of Ignite Reading, a virtual tutoring model that offers students 15 minutes of one-on-one help over Zoom during the school day. Now in California, New York and Massachusetts, the program will serve 1,000 students by this fall.
Results from a pilot program at Kipp Bridge Academy in West Oakland showed that when tutors began working with the third graders on decoding skills, they responded with 77 percent accuracy on a DIBELS “oral reading fluency” test. After 53 days, their accuracy increased to 86 percent.
From “We Have First-Graders Who Can’t Sing the Alphabet Song’: Pandemic Continues to Push Young Readers Off Track, New Data Shows,” the 74 (February 2022)
