This form can be used either by parents or by school staff to find the why for a student.
Currently set for parents.
If a child struggles to read, there is a reason.
Schools typically test students often to identify how well a student is doing. The tests reveal the performance level and identify gaps, where a student is not meeting expectations.
These types of tests seldom identify why a student is struggling. We have developed a model based upon decades of field experience and the research of many in the field.
Schools primarily provide more instruction as the solution to learning gaps. If more instruction works, that is great. If it does not, then it is time to dig deeper and try to understand why. Once the possible why is known, that can guide finding a solution.
This model is not intended to diagnose anything. If using the model flags a possible cause, seek professional advice as appropriate. The model currently only saves your information to your browser. Over time we will create a record system to help you track your information longer-term. No information is shared with third parties.
It can be frustrating to know your child is struggling, you don't know why and you don't have a possible solution. The purpose of this model is to help you find the why, which can then help you to find a solution.
Below is the list of everything proficient reading requires.
Nothing on this page needs doing. It is here to read. Each item is something that has to be working for a child to read a passage and understand it, and each one can fail on its own.
A reading test reports that a child is struggling. It does not report which of these broke — and that is the whole difficulty, because the same score comes out no matter which one it was.
In the list below, each item is tagged word library or comprehension to show which camp it belongs to. Items with no tag — the machinery, the builders, the conditions — serve both. Note that the first band splits across the two: getting a word off the page and working out what a sentence means are both happening on every line.
And one check separates them in about ten minutes. Two passages at the same reading level — one on a subject the child knows well, one on a subject they do not. Fine on the familiar and lost on the unfamiliar means the machinery is working and the fuel is thin. Struggling on both points at the machinery. Almost nobody runs it.
Everything on this page sits under one of two failures. Knowing which one a child is in does not tell you the cause — but it tells you what has to happen, and in what order.
Words do not come off the page reliably. Either accuracy is poor, or accuracy is fine and every word costs so much effort that nothing is left over.
Schools do detect this. It is what the early screeners are built to find, and the detection works: of the children Colorado’s K–3 screener flagged, 96% went on to fail the third-grade test. Being flagged is close to a prediction.
What schools do about it is more instruction. That is the right treatment only if the reason the library is not building is that not enough teaching happened. Often it is not — it is hearing, or vision, or working memory, or a child who has stopped trying. More instruction aimed past an unaddressed cause produces years of intervention and no movement.
The sequence that is almost never followed: find why the library is not building — clear that — then build the library — then build comprehension. Schools start at step three and stop there.
The words come off the page and the meaning does not arrive. The child can read a passage aloud and tell you almost nothing about it.
Schools mostly do not detect this, because the instruments are not looking for it. Of the children Colorado’s screener said were fine, 45% failed the third-grade test anyway. That group is largely this camp, and nothing flagged them.
And the belief that does the most damage: that comprehension is what you work on after decoding is finished — so, around third grade. It is not. The comprehension engine is built through conversation, being read to, and being asked questions that get harder, starting at about three years old. A child arrives at kindergarten having climbed that ladder or not, and reading instruction does nothing about it either way.
It is built orally, long before print, and it keeps being built orally for years after, because a child’s understanding runs years ahead of their decoding. Reading aloud to a child above their own reading level is not a comfort activity. It is the main way this gets built.
Weak working memory produces a thin library and a concept that will not hold. Poor hearing produces both. A child who has given up produces both. The camp tells you where the failure shows. It does not tell you why — which is the rest of this page.
Schools measure whether decoding is accurate. Almost nobody measures how deep the library is — how many words come without effort. The split between accuracy and rate is the closest thing available, and it is usually sitting in data the school already has: accurate but slow means the mechanism works and the library was never filled. More phonics will not touch that.
A child can be in both camps at once. Work the more upstream one first.
Most children who struggle have one or two of these not working. Some have several, and they are usually connected — the one furthest down the list often explains the ones above it.
What happens next. The questions on the first page use what you have already noticed to narrow this list to the two or three worth looking at first. If you would rather work through it yourself, the next page lets you mark each item as you go.
Work through the engine and the fuel. Take them in any order. Click a part to see what it is, what it looks like when it is not working, and how to check it.
Everything on this page so far describes what is not working. These are the answers to the next question: why is that part not working?
They come last deliberately. A condition means nothing until something is failing — a child who sleeps badly and reads fine has no problem here to solve. And starting with a list of questions about the home would make this look like a survey and bury the point.
And ask when about every one of them. A condition can have blocked the part being built in the first place, or it can be blocking it from running today, or — most commonly — both. That is not a judgment about anyone. It has an empirical answer: clear it, then look again. If performance recovers, it was blocking the running. If it does not, the part was never built and still has to be.
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