{"id":24330,"date":"2024-11-05T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-05T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nwea.org\/blog\/?p=24330"},"modified":"2025-10-29T09:45:46","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T16:45:46","slug":"how-map-reading-fluency-with-coach-supports-word-recognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nwea.org\/blog\/2024\/how-map-reading-fluency-with-coach-supports-word-recognition\/","title":{"rendered":"How MAP Reading Fluency with Coach supports word recognition"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reading is one of the hardest things humans learn to do. Letters on a page are a mysterious code waiting to be cracked, because word recognition and literacy don\u2019t develop naturally like talking does. We literally have to rewire our brains to attain these skills. The good news is that through brain imaging, we have learned that there is a science to making this rewiring happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are two major types of action that need to take place for students to learn to read. First, explicit instruction in all facets of reading\u2014including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Second, students need abundant practice in reading, as it is nearly impossible for our brains to rewire unless we are getting lots of practice and repetition. This evidence-based rewiring of the brain is the major outcome supported by MAP\u00ae Reading Fluency\u2122 with Coach<\/a>, our reading assessment with an embedded AI-powered tutoring solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my last article<\/a>, I explained the importance of academic scaffolding, a strong but temporary support students can stand on as they learn new skills. And I showed how MAP Reading Fluency with Coach is designed to provide robust scaffolding for readers, in the form of microinterventions, wherever those readers happen to be on their literacy journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I\u2019d like to explore how academic scaffolding works in practice. The closer you look at a scaffolding system in the classroom, the more you see that it\u2019s made up of many individual parts, which educators can select or swap out as needed to fit a student\u2019s needs. These parts are what we mean when we talk about microinterventions, and we organize them into categories, one of which is word recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Word recognition and its theoretical framework<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re familiar with Philip Gough and William Tunmer\u2019s Simple View of Reading<\/a>, then you know this familiar equation: reading comprehension is the product of word recognition and language comprehension. In other words, for people to understand what they read, they must be able to recognize words in print and make sense of oral language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In addition to the Simple View of Reading, there\u2019s Hollis Scarborough\u2019s Strand Model of Skilled Reading<\/a>, which you may know as the Reading Rope. This model represents all the different aspects of reading\u2014for example, decoding and background knowledge\u2014that make comprehension possible as strands that are braided together to from a strong literacy \u201crope.\u201d The microinterventions available in Coach are informed by the Reading Rope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students\u2019 ability to recognize words in print depends on their ability to hear and distinguish sounds, identify letters, and decode, turning letters into their corresponding sounds. With explicit instruction and abundant practice, words are stored in the brain for immediate retrieval, thus allowing a reader to progress from decoding to automatic word recognition, freeing up space in the brain to focus on making meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Word recognition microinterventions: When, what, and how<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

You may recall that MAP Reading Fluency with Coach uses assessment data to place students into personalized tutoring sessions, based on where they are as readers and what they need to grow. This placement stage is key to ensuring all the scaffolds that follow are tailored to each student. Once placement has been made and students launch MAP Reading Fluency with Coach from a web-based device, they meet Maya, their coach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the friendly human face behind MAP Reading Fluency with Coach\u2019s sophisticated AI technology, Maya actively listens to students as they read aloud, detecting errors to deliver just-in-time microinterventions in component skills like phonemic awareness, decoding, sight recognition of high-frequency words, and fluency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are just a few examples of Maya\u2019s word recognition microinterventions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n