Fountas & Pinnell Reading Assessment Rebecca McCormick EDAD 618, Fall 2013

Who are Fountas & Pinnell? Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell were working together as reading Recovery Teachers in the early 1990s when they began to develop a system where they could match books to readers and provide differentiated instruction to small reading groups. In 1996, the two women released a book with their leveled literacy system and their instructions for Guided Reading groups.

What is the Fountas & Pinnell Assessment System? The F&P system is a measure of student’s reading level (ability). It is leveled according to letters with the following approximate grade level correlations: Before administering the assessment (running record), students are often asked to read off a leveled word list which will give an approximate reading start level.

What is the Fountas & Pinell Assessment System? Running Records are given to students to determine reading levels. Running Records are evaluations of a student’s oral and independent reading that identify strengths and/or weaknesses in fluency, decoding, and comprehension. Levels are used to match students with books that they can read and to create differentiated reading groups.

What is the Fountas & Pinnell Assessment System? After administering a running record, teachers must determine a student’s reading level. The following chart serves as a guide: If the first book is…Then… Easy Levels A-K: Students read at 95% - 100% accuracy with excellent or satisfactory comprehension. Levels L – N: Student reads at 98% - 100% accuracy with excellent or satisfactory comprehension. Move to a higher level text and repeat the same process until the student reads a text that is hard. Instructional Levels A-K: Students read at 90% - 94% accuracy with excellent or satisfactory comprehension or 95% - 100% accuracy with limited comprehension. Levels L - N: Students read at 95% - 97% accuracy with excellent or satisfactory comprehension or 98% - 100% accuracy with limited comprehension. Move to a lower level text and repeat the same process until the student reads a text that is easy and move to a higher level text until the student reads a text that is hard. Hard Levels A – K: Student reads at below 90% accuracy with any score on comprehension Levels L – N: Student reads at below 95% accuracy with any score on comprehension. Move to a lower level text and repeat the same process until the student reads a text at an instructional level.

What do you do with the data? Teachers use the data to create differentiated reading groups. In groups, teachers will work on an instructional text that is one up from the student’s reading level to push them to read this independently. The following link provides the characteristics of each text level and what teachers can do to scaffold students to the next level: Pinnell%20Guided%20Reading%20Text%20Level%20Descriptions.pdf Schools use the data to track students’ reading progress throughout the course of a year. Data is also used to identify students who could benefit from intervention services like Leveled Literacy Intervention.

Limitations of Fountas & Pinell Works very well with primary grade students, but its success is limited with upper elementary students. To assess one child it is VERY time consuming, especially as students become more fluent readers. Due to these time constraints, in SMUSD upper grade teachers are only required to F&P students whom they have concerns about. Many other leveling systems (Lexile, STAR reading, DRA) to use that are less time consuming. Unfortunately, there is no direct correlation between these and F&P. Kits and intervention programs are expensive. Any questions?