How does UFLI work as a Progress Monitoring Tool? 

OnYourMark has taken UFLI’s Scope and Sequence to help identify critical skills. Using this progress monitoring resource allows us to track students’ skill development, ensure they receive the right content at the right time, and provide valuable insights into their progress in foundational skills. Below you’ll find a chart with samples of the critical skills assessed, along with the associated UFLI target skills and progress monitoring words/sentences.

Here is an excerpt from UFLI’s manual about the use of spelling to monitor student progress: 

Monitoring students’ growth is an essential part of skill development. Effective progress monitoring allows you to see exactly which students need extra support on which skills and when they need it. Unfortunately, administering frequent, individual assessments can be extremely time consuming. 

To address these issues, we are providing a simple way for you to monitor progress on a more frequent basis through spelling tests[..]. Spelling assessments for ongoing progress monitoring can be a great way to quickly measure decoding skills. Although a child who is proficient in decoding words may not be proficient in encoding them, one who is proficient in encoding is almost guaranteed to be proficient in decoding. 

However, the way spelling tests are typically used does not accomplish this. Memorizing a list of 10-20 words requires very different (and much less useful) skills than learning how to apply a set of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. 

Depending on where your students are in the scope and sequence, assessments can include any combination of the following types of items: 

• Grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). For these items, you will pronounce a phoneme, and your students will write the associated grapheme [...] 
• Regular words. These items will be words formed with the grapheme-phoneme correspondences and patterns learned thus far in the lessons. 
• Irregular words. During their lessons, students will learn to read and spell irregular words [...] That is, they will learn to recognize the regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences in the word and to remember any irregular part(s). These words are assessed in their own section of the test. 
• Sentence dictation. In addition to spelling individual words, children will also write sentences that you dictate [...] These sentences may include both regular and irregular words. 

In determining next steps after progress monitoring, the guidance provided to tutors is:

• • If students get less than 50% of the words correct, repeat the same lesson for review.
  • If students get about 50% correct, move on to the next lesson within the same skill.
  • If students get all words right, move on to the next set of skills.