26 Definition of ‘Support Needed’
We defined the support needed category by means of their performance on language-appropriate standardized reading outcome measures from the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement IV (WJ; Schrank, McGrew, and Mather 2014) and the parallel Batería IV Woodcock-Muñoz (WM; Woodcock et al. 2019). Specifically, we used the Basic Reading/Destrezas Básicas en Lectura cluster scores in kindergarten and the Broad Reading/Lectura Amplia cluster scores in grades 1 and 2. The Basic Reading cluster taps into foundational reading skills and comprises a weighted average of the Letter-Word Identification/Identificación de Letras y Palabras and Word Attack/Análisis de Palabras tests. The Broad Reading cluster combines the Letter-Word Identification/Identificación de Letras y Palabras, Passage Comprehension/Comprensión de Textos, and Sentence Reading Fluency/Fluidez en Lectura de Frases tests to provide an overall measure of reading achievement, thereby assessing decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills.
Importantly, we classified students as needing support when scoring at or below the 20th percentile within our large and diverse sample. Our choice to use a within-sample percentile cut-off was motivated by our sample’s relatively low performance in relation to the published national norms for the U.S (Figure 26.1). Several factors may contribute to the observed lower performance of our sample compared to WJ/WM norms for the U.S., including higher child poverty rates (Reyes-Vallarde, 2023), higher rates of multilingualism (CDE, 2023b), variability in effectiveness of reading instruction in public schools (Langreo, 2024), and possible bias in regional norms.
We chose to use the 20th percentile cutoff so that our screener could identify students before they fall behind so far that they become eligible for special educational services, often at or below the 7th percentile (National Center for Education Statistics 2024; Abu-Hamour et al. 2012).