Our university-based tutoring program is offered each fall and spring semester. The literacy tutoring program for elementary students is designed for struggling readers and is held throughout the fall and spring semesters at the Center. This tutorial program is an important part of an advanced literacy instruction class for undergraduate students seeking degrees in education. During the school year the children come to the Center for an hour, two days a week during each semester. We work closely with families and provide continuous communication as work with each child during the semester.
Literacy instruction in the tutoring programs is focused on meeting the needs of students by utilizing various instructional methods, assessments, and technology to enrich the development of each student. Our University faculty and staff are dedicated to the advancement of literacy for all students.
An informal reading inventory (IRI) is an authentic standards-based assessment. It is composed of a series of reading passages that begin at pre-primer level and progressively become more difficult. As a reader progresses from easier passages to more difficult ones, the examiner records, analyzes, and summarizes data that reflect the reader's application or default of standards and indicators of reading competency: prior knowledge/prediction, word recognition, fluency, and comprehension.
The Center for Learning & Literacy does not diagnose reading disabilities. We offer informal assessments of a student's reading abilities based on observation. We use the Analytic Reading Inventory (Woods and Moe, 2011).
If you would like your child to be tested for a specific reading disability, we recommend seeking a licensed clinical and/or educational psychologist.
Knowing informal reading inventory data enables classroom teachers, reading specialists, and school psychologists to make evidence-based instructional decisions and to report student progress in standards-based terms. Standardized testing does not provide such detailed instructionally connected data (Woods & More, 2011 p. 2).
Woods, M.L. & Moe, A.J. (2011), Analytical Reading Inventory. (9th Ed.), Pearson, New York.