Liam – Year 4
Liam* began working with Educate Tutoring in 2018 to access academic support as the family were concerned about a potential dyslexia diagnosis. He has been following a Spalding-based program focusing on the sound/symbol connection, word analysis, developing decoding and encoding skills and identifying and applying elements of sentence and paragraph structure both when reading and in his own writing.
The graphs below show Liam’s reading and spelling progress as measured by three different assessments.
READING ASSESSMENT A
Phonics, Decoding and Word Comprehension
At the time of initial assessment, Liam’s chronological age was 8 years and 11 months. His equivalent reading age** was 9 years, approximately two months above the expected level for his chronological age.
After only eight months of tutoring when Liam’s chronological age was 9 years and 7 months, his equivalent reading age was 10 years and 6 months. This showed an overall increase of 18 months, which is eleven months above the expected standard for his chronological age.
READING ASSESSMENT B
Word Decoding
As with Reading Assessment A, Liam’s chronological age at the time of initial assessment was 8 years and 11 months. His equivalent reading age was 7 years and 9 months, approximately 14 months below the expected level for his chronological age.
After only two months of tutoring when Liam’s chronological age was 9 years, his equivalent reading age was 8 years and 6 months. This showed an overall increase of 8 months which was now only six months below the expected standard for his chronological age, showing that he had begun to close the gap.
After another 12 months of tutoring (14 months in total) when Liam’s chronological age was 10 years, his equivalent reading age was 11 years and 4 months. This showed an overall increase of 3 years and 6 months from his initial assessment, which is 1 year and 4 months above the expected standard for his chronological age.
SPELLING ASSESSMENT A
Word Encoding
As with Reading Assessments A and B, Liam’s chronological age at the time of initial assessment was 8 years and 11 months. His equivalent spelling age was 9 years and 6 months, approximately seven months above the expected level for his chronological age.
After only one month of tutoring, Liam’s chronological age was 9 years. His equivalent spelling age of 10 years showed an overall increase of six months – now twelve months above the expected standard for his chronological age.
Liam continued with his tuition program, and after another five months of tutoring (six months in total), when his chronological age was 9 years and 5 months, his equivalent spelling age was 9 years and 2 months. This showed a decrease of 10 months from his most recent assessment, which was three months below the expected standardfor his chronological age.
Following an additional six months of tuition, when Liam’s chronological age was 9 years and 11 months, his equivalent spelling age was 12 years and 2 months. This showed an increase of 3 years from his most recent assessment, now placing him at 2 years and 3 months above the expected standard for his chronological age.
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Liam’s trajectory, in what quickly became an Academic Extension program, illustrates that every child’s learning experience is different and rarely linear.
Liam’s family have been very generous in their support of the work done by Educate Tutoring in enabling their son to develop his skills, knowledge and confidence in his ability to learn.
*Student details have been changed.
** Equivalent reading ages calculated using standardised test norms.
Please note these results were obtained through an individual Academic Intervention Program consisting of weekly one-hour tutorials over a fourteen month duration.
Educate Tutoring cannot guarantee results as student progress is dependent on a range of factors including but not limited to:
- Consistent tuition attendance
- Family commitment and support
- Student engagement