edWebinar – The Overlooked Metrics Impacting Literacy Outcomes: Reading Efficiency and Underdeveloped Visual Skills

Two critical, but often-missed factors sit underneath students’ reading struggles: inefficient reading habits and underdeveloped visual skills. These factors are more common than most educators realize. Roughy 70% of students reading at below proficient levels read inefficiently. And signs of underdeveloped visual skills appear in about half of low-performing elementary readers and a quarter of middle schoolers. Most assessments tell educators that a student is struggling, not how efficiently they read or whether the student’s visual skills are ready to handle the demands of reading. Neither inefficient reading nor underdeveloped visual skills are disabilities; they can be developed through targeted visual skill and reading efficiency instruction.