206-56 Wyo. Code R. §§ 56-2 - Definitions

(a) "Diagnostic Assessment" refers to a tool administered to an individual student in order to determine strengths and pinpoint specific areas of need in order to guide instruction or intervention.

(b) "Evidence Based" practices refer to assessment, instruction, and intervention practices that have been tested and described through rigorously designed, peer reviewed research studies using quantitative and qualitative approaches, have been rigorously studied over time through multiple opportunities and contexts, and have been shown to have a positive effect on student achievement.

(c) "Foundational Reading Skills" include skills needed in order to be proficient and automatic in word recognition including phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition.

(d) "Language Comprehension" includes elements to support the comprehension of oral or written words including background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.

(e) "Oral Reading Fluency" refers to the ability to read text accurately, with sufficient, automaticity, prosody, and accuracy. Fluent and automatic reading is essential because it permits the reader to focus on constructing meaning from the text rather than on decoding words.

(f) "Phonemic Awareness" refers to the conscious awareness of individual speech sounds (consonants and vowels) in spoken syllables and the ability to consciously manipulate those sounds including isolating, blending, segmenting, adding, deleting, and substituting the smallest units of sound in spoken words.

(g) "Phonological Awareness" is the conscious awareness of (including phonemic awareness) and ability to manipulate all levels of the speech sound system, including recognizing and producing rhymes, word boundaries, stress patterns, syllables, onset-rime units, and phonemes as well as whole words within sentences.

(h) "Phonics" is the study of the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent; phonics also may be used as a descriptor of code-based instruction.

(i) "Progress Monitoring" is the use of reliable and valid measures to systematically and regularly assess a student's performance over time to measure responsiveness to reading instruction or intervention.

Notes

206-56 Wyo. Code R. §§ 56-2

Adopted, Eff. 11/3/2023.