TExES STR 293 cheat sheet

Simple View of Reading: reading comprehension = decoding × linguistic comprehension; both factors are necessary and a weakness in either limits overall comprehension.

Scarborough's Reading Rope weaves word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition) with language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge).

Structured literacy is explicit, systematic, cumulative, and diagnostic, and integrates phonology, sound-symbol association, syllable instruction, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

Gradual release of responsibility moves from teacher modeling (I do), to guided practice with feedback (we do), to collaborative practice, to independent application (you do).

MTSS/RTI tiers: Tier 1 is core instruction for all students, Tier 2 is targeted small-group support, Tier 3 is intensive individualized intervention; movement between tiers is driven by progress-monitoring data.

An explicit phonics lesson sequence is review of prior skills, statement of objective, teacher modeling, guided practice with corrective feedback, then application in connected text.

A systematic, cumulative scope and sequence orders skills from simple to complex so each new skill builds on previously mastered ones, and previously taught elements reappear in later lessons.

Engagement and motivation are supported by student choice, authentic purposes for reading, generous reading volume, and teacher read-alouds of rich text.

The phonological awareness continuum runs from word awareness, to syllable awareness, to onset-rime awareness, to phoneme-level awareness; phonemic awareness (blending, segmenting, deleting, substituting) is the most complex level.

Concepts of print include book orientation, left-to-right and top-to-bottom directionality, the return sweep at the end of a line, word spacing, and recognition of punctuation.

The alphabetic principle is the understanding that letters map onto sounds in spoken words and that these correspondences can be used to read and spell.

A typical phonics sequence moves from single consonants and short vowels, to blends and digraphs, to silent-e long vowels, to vowel teams, r-controlled vowels, diphthongs, and multisyllable words.

The six syllable types are closed, open, vowel-consonant-e, vowel team, r-controlled, and consonant-le; each predicts a vowel sound and supports multisyllable decoding.

Orthographic mapping binds phonemes to graphemes so that words are stored for instant retrieval; it requires phonemic proficiency plus secure letter-sound knowledge and underlies sight word recognition.

Ehri's phases of word reading are pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic, progressing from visual cue reliance to full letter-sound decoding and chunking.

Fluency comprises accuracy, automatic rate, and prosody; automatic word recognition frees cognitive resources for comprehension rather than for identifying words.

Irregular high-frequency words are best taught by drawing attention to the regularly decodable parts and explicitly teaching the unpredictable portion.

Vocabulary tiers: Tier 1 words are basic and common in everyday speech, Tier 2 words are high-frequency academic words that appear across domains, and Tier 3 words are low-frequency domain-specific terms.

Narrative text structure follows story grammar: characters, setting, initiating event or problem, internal response, goal, attempts, outcome, and resolution.

Expository text structures include description, sequence, compare-contrast, cause-effect, and problem-solution; signal words such as because, however, and first cue the structure.

Comprehension question types range from literal (stated in text), to inferential (implied by text plus background knowledge), to evaluative (judgment supported by evidence).

Before-, during-, and after-reading strategies include predicting, activating prior knowledge, questioning, visualizing, monitoring and repairing meaning, summarizing, and retelling.

Text complexity is judged with a triad: quantitative measures (readability formulas, Lexile), qualitative features (levels of meaning, structure, knowledge demands), and reader-and-task considerations.

Background knowledge about the topic is one of the strongest predictors of comprehension and is built through wide reading, discussion, and content-rich instruction.

Close reading involves repeated readings of a short complex text paired with text-dependent questions that require evidence drawn directly from the text.

Universal screening is brief and given to all students early in the year to flag risk; diagnostic assessment then pinpoints specific skill deficits for students identified as at risk.

Progress monitoring uses brief measures given frequently (weekly or biweekly) to evaluate whether an intervention is producing adequate growth.

Summative assessment occurs at the end of a unit or year to measure overall outcomes and program effectiveness rather than to adjust day-to-day instruction.

Curriculum-based measurement is standardized and timed; oral reading fluency (words correct per minute) is a common benchmark used for screening and growth tracking.

An informal reading inventory or running record identifies independent, instructional, and frustration levels; roughly 95 percent or higher accuracy indicates independent level and 90-94 percent indicates instructional level.

Miscue analysis examines oral reading errors to show whether a reader is drawing on meaning (semantic), sentence structure (syntactic), or letter-sound (graphophonic) information.

Reliability refers to consistency of scores across occasions, raters, or forms; validity refers to the degree to which an instrument measures what it claims to measure.

Formative assessment is ongoing and embedded in instruction, used in the moment to adjust grouping, pacing, and reteaching decisions.

A test can be reliable without being valid, but it cannot be valid without being reliable.