Score 4 Reading

Since Score 4 is an intervention for readers who are struggling, as opposed to emerging, the approach is focused on the reading formula rather than on the individual components or systems that allow one to be a successful and wonderful reader.  In other words, if a reader knows language structure (syntax), vocabulary (semantics), and the symbols on the page (grapho-phonics), and is still a struggling reader, the problem is not that he or she is missing information, but that the reader doesn’t know how to appropriately integrate the information that is known.  Right ingredients, wrong mix.

 

The Score 4 approach is focused on compelling the reader to implicitly rethink the formula being used for reading.  We have so many bright, capable, people beyond the age of seven years old who know what they need to know, and yet when they go to read, they do not comfortably understand what they are reading about. 

 

Reading Theory tells us that an appropriate integration of the cueing systems with the goal of comfortably understanding an author’s intended meaning will result in successful reading.  Process Learning Theory tells us that if a brain has an experience of doing something right (i.e. it actually works well), the brain will continue experimenting with the strategies that worked until that brain has ownership over the process, so that there is an actual physiological change in the neural pathway for reading.

 

Explicit direct instruction for changing a procedural formula is an ineffective way to cause procedural changes.  The brain must experiment and experience over and over again in order to own the change.  There is a difference between memorizing something and internalizing something.  Internalizing causes ownership of the process and creates wonderful readers.  Because Score 4’s method is reflective of an understanding of both of these theories, the results are meaningful and begin happening quickly enough for any reader to be excited about his or her future reading abilities.  And they even have fun doing it!