CSU Home > Department of Teacher Education > Endorsements > Reading Endorsement

Reading Endorsement
      Elizabeth Dudley Holmes, right, director of CSU's Center for Quality Teaching and Learning, coordinates CSU's Undergraduate Reading Endorsement Program through CQTL. Her office is in Suite 347 of the Cunningham Center for Leadership Development, and she can be reached by phone at 706-565-3645, by sending e-mail to holmes_elizabeth@colstate.edu or by faxing 706-565-3648.

Course of study
     The Undergraduate Reading Endorsement Program is a non-traditional, professional development program for classroom reading teachers and their school leaders. The program serves primary and elementary schools that register cohorts of teachers in grades P-5, special educators, school administrators and support professionals for 125 contact hours of intensive work targeting improved reading attainment in a school setting. Five instructional units make up the instructional program, which awards nine semester hours of academic credit and a Reading Endorsement.

The E-Prep Program focuses on preparing early-childhood and elementary educators for competency in demonstrating the performance standards of the International Reading Association's Standards for Reading Professionals - Revised 2003. Educators gain proficiency in meeting the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) standards and the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS). E-Prep was developed in response to the findings of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as published in the 2000 Report of the National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction, and the statutes advanced in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107-110, 115 Stat. 1425 (2002.

Five courses comprise the Undergraduate Reading Endorsement:

EDCI 5555U:  Assessment Guides Teaching for Meaning
Candidates examine the role of assessment in reading and writing instruction. An introduction to modern electronic reading and writing assessment instruments prepares candidates to implement a school-wide plan for data collection in classrooms. A combination of data collection, analysis, interpretation and subsequent application of research-based strategies to instruction is introduced as the framework for restructuring the pedagogy of reading and writing in the elementary grades.

EDCI 5555U: Phonics Builds Capacity for Meaning
Candidates focus on instruction in phonological and phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle and decoding as essential components of a balanced reading program. Using data drawn from screenings and diagnostic testing, candidates place students along an instructional continuum. Candidates learn to build student competency with phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, alphabetic principles and phonics. Use of phonetically controlled leveled readers guide explicit and systematic reading instruction based on scientific reading research. Candidates come to understand the scope, sequence and strategies that work simultaneously and systematically to bring students from emerging skills sub-lexical skills toward proficiency in decoding and automatic word recognition.

EDCI 5555U:  Vocabulary Expands Meaning
Candidates focus on the complex interrelationships between a student’s spoken and written vocabulary and reading comprehension. Using the National Reading Panel’s five evidence-based strategies for vocabulary acquisition, candidates identify methods for teaching automatic recognition of high frequency and sight word vocabulary while increasing skills in teaching and assessing word recognition and word knowledge. In the process, candidates come to understand the influence of the language hierarchy, background knowledge, word knowledge and wide reading on reading comprehension.

EDCI 5555U:  Text Comprehension Is Meaning
Candidates assess student comprehension levels and design scientifically based instruction in response to diagnosed comprehension needs. Using the Burns and Roe Reading Informal, candidates assess and monitor student’s word recognition and comprehension skills over one academic year. Candidates become familiar with scholarly research that structures the process of learning to read into two broad phases: Learning to Read and Reading to Learn. Given this framework, candidates participate in reading comprehension exercises that demonstrate the six evidence-based comprehension strategies identified by the National Reading Panel. Candidates call upon their knowledge of the Stages of Reading and the National Reading Panel’s evidence-based comprehension strategies to design and deliver direct instruction that will measurably improve student’s word recognition and text comprehension skills.

EDCI 5555U:  Fluency Enhances Capacity for Meaning
Candidates become skilled in use of fluency assessments and efficient in providing explicit fluency instruction. Using analyses of oral reading rate, accuracy rate and oral reading expression, candidates diagnose instructional needs in the area of fluency. Once data is gathered, candidates design a program of explicit fluency instruction that is responsive to the student’s diagnosed fluency needs. Candidates gain the knowledge and skills needed to plan and implement reading fluency instruction that challenges and builds a student’s ability to read accurately, rapidly, and with expression such that reading comprehension is enhanced.

Upon completion of the five units, a candidate earns nine undergraduate credit hours, a Reading Endorsement and has demonstrated progress in meeting the performance standards identified in the Standards for Reading Professionals (Classroom Teachers)- Revised 2003.  Further, the candidate can provide and interpret diagnostic data to document student progress toward meeting grade-level standards in the five essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, text comprehension and fluency.