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Definition: Reading Assistant reports a student’s mastery of a series of words commonly referred to as High Frequency Words. The list of words is associated with a grade-level timeline for mastery and is composed of words from the Dolch list , and Fry’s list, and HMH Into Reading High Frequency Words. Each time a child is asked to read a word from the high frequency word list, Reading Assistant scores their reading as correct or incorrect, and this is recorded in the Skills Reports for teachers.
While some of the words do not follow decoding patterns, such as the words “the” or “I,” some words are decodable but are included in the list due to their frequent appearance in literature.
High Frequency Words in Reading Assistant: Reading Assistant’s word corpus includes over 300 High Frequency Words. While learning High Frequency Words can improve a child’s reading confidence and fluency, it’s important to note that phoneme and grapheme instruction and practice are crucial for learning to read and developing knowledge of High Frequency Words. Recognizing words without verbally decoding is valuable, but memorization cannot replace explicit phonics instruction.
In Reading Assistant, students will sometimes accurately decode a high frequency word but still have it appear as incorrect in the Skills Report. For example, a first grader was accurately decoding the High Frequency word “an” but Reading Assistant showed this skill as unmastered. After additional inspection and listening to recordings of the student, it was clear the child was reading a sentence like, “I see an elephant” as “I see a elephant.” The child was accurately decoding “an” but incorrectly changing it to “a” because she didn’t understand the vowel correspondence. In situations like these, Reading Assistant is providing information about high frequency word recognition that goes beyond decoding or memorization.
Scale Used: Teachers can find a student’s specific performance with the various High Frequency Words in the Skills Reports.
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