LitLab + UFLI Foundations: Precise & Rigorous Alignment for Science of Reading Classrooms

LitLab was built to make high-quality decodable reading practice effortless for teachers, and that begins with aligning to the phonics instruction schools already trust. For many classrooms, that foundation is UFLI Foundations, a research-based phonics program grounded in the Science of Reading and widely used across K-3.

This post explains how LitLab ensures precise, data-verified alignment with UFLI Foundations through every word students encounter. Using decodability analysis across thousands of stories, you’ll see how LitLab maintains over 95% decodability throughout the complete UFLI sequence. The result is simple: teachers get rigorously aligned materials that fit their existing instruction, and students gain quality and engaging reading practice that builds confidence, fluency, and mastery one skill at a time.

Why UFLI Alignment Matters

UFLI (University of Florida Literacy Institute) Foundations offers a structured scope and sequence that teaches phonics systematically from simple to complex patterns. Teachers using UFLI need materials that match that progression precisely.

According to research, the level of decoding difficulty in a text is a unique and significant predictor of both miscues and passage reading fluency (Saha et al., 2021). In other words, when students encounter phonics patterns they haven’t yet been taught, they’re more likely to struggle with accuracy and fluency during oral reading.

This highlights the importance of tightly controlled, skill-aligned texts—like those in LitLab—where decodability is optimized.

Practicing newly learned grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) in context helps solidify decoding skills. Research shows that students who practice taught GPCs in decodable texts apply more letter-sound knowledge strategies when reading less controlled or authentic texts later on (Mesmer, 2008). In short, highly decodable reading builds transferable skills.

That’s where LitLab’s alignment with UFLI makes a difference.

Every UFLI story in LitLab is built around a specific UFLI lesson, carefully controlling for phonics patterns so that students encounter only those they’ve been explicitly taught.

How LitLab Ensures UFLI Decodability

At LitLab we've developed a phonics-aware AI assistant that helps us create decodable stories that adheres very tightly to the target skill and prior skills from the UFLI Foundations scope and sequence. Each story in LitLab’s Grab-and-Go Decodable Library is created and evaluated by an educator who is an expert in the Science of Reading.

A cornerstone of this process is ensuring high decodability. What is decodability? Decodability is the percentage of words that can be decoded by a student using the patterns a student has been taught up to that point. This concept is a cornerstone of UFLI Foundations and followed strictly for all LitLab stories.

We measure this using the same phoneme-grapheme correspondence progression defined by UFLI. The result: highly controlled texts that maintain readability, coherence, and instructional alignment.

The Data: How Decodable Are LitLab Stories?

To quantify how closely LitLab aligns with UFLI, we analyzed thousands of stories across the entire UFLI sequence. The results speak for themselves.

1. Median Decodability by UFLI Skill

How tightly aligned are LitLab’s stories to UFLI’s skills and pedagogy?

Not only does LitLab offer numerous stories for each UFLI skill, the data above shows that across all 128 UFLI Lessons, LitLab stories maintain a median decodability above 90%, with most skills exceeding 95%. Each point on this chart represents the median decodability for stories tagged to that skill, meaning that nearly all words in those stories can be decoded using that skill and prior knowledge.

This demonstrates consistency across the full scope and sequence, ensuring teachers can trust that LitLab stories remain tightly aligned from early short vowels through advanced vowel teams and r-controlled syllables.

2. Story Decodability Distribution

How decodable are LitLab’s stories?

The above figure shows the distribution by decodability for all UFLI-aligned decodables that are available to educators in LitLab’s Grab-and-Go Decodable Library. The higher the count of stories in a decodability bucket, the more stories LitLab has to offer teachers at that decodability level. First, notice that there are no stories in LitLab’s staff-curated grab-and-go decodable library with a decodability lower than 75%. LitLab’s UFLI-aligned stories maintain a median decodability above 97%, with fewer than 5% of all LitLab UFLI-aligned stories having a decodability below 86%.

In other words, nearly all stories are highly decodable, and even the lowest 5% maintain strong alignment to UFLI’s principles and pedagogy. This provides teachers flexibility to differentiate (beyond skill-level), by using the most controlled texts for early practice or slightly more open texts for fluency and comprehension work.

3. Story Length vs. Decodability

But are all LitLab stories created equal?

The above scatter plot shows the decodability (y-axis) as a function of the number of words in each story (x-axis) on LitLab. The graph shows that LitLab stories remain consistently decodable regardless of length. Even as word count increases from early 30-word CVC stories to more advanced 400-word passages, decodability stays above 90%. An analysis shows the correlation between Word Count and Decodability was 0.06, which indicates no significant correlation between these two variables. This means teachers can confidently assign longer stories for fluency and comprehension without compromising their instructional practice.

What This Means for Classrooms

For teachers, the takeaway is simple: LitLab fits directly into UFLI-based phonics instruction without adding extra steps or guesswork. Every decodable story in LitLab has already been analyzed for decodability, tagged by UFLI lesson, and verified to stay within the phonics patterns students have been taught.

Teachers can:

• Search by UFLI lesson or skill to instantly find stories that reinforce that day’s instruction.
• Assign or print stories with confidence, knowing every text meets rigorous decodability thresholds.
• Use decodability metrics to choose the right level of challenge for each group or individual reader.
• Create new stories with LitLab’s story generator, which automatically aligns to the same UFLI skill progression used in the Grab-and-Go Library.

For administrators, this alignment ensures instructional consistency and data-backed quality across classrooms. Schools can be confident that all decodable materials, whether created by staff or selected from LitLab’s library, follow the same structured phonics framework. This reduces variation between teachers, supports fidelity to UFLI, and strengthens overall reading outcomes.

In short, LitLab makes it easy to bring rigorous, Science of Reading aligned practice to every student. Teachers spend less time searching for the right materials and more time teaching. Students spend more time reading stories that match what they have learned, building both accuracy and fluency in authentic, engaging contexts.

Together, UFLI and LitLab provide the structure and scalability schools need to turn systematic phonics instruction into confident, joyful reading.

Ready to See UFLI Alignment in Action?

Explore the full UFLI-aligned Grab-and-Go Decodable Library and see how LitLab supports your district’s literacy goals with precise, consistent phonics practice.

Written by: Drew McCann, K-3 Literacy Specialist and Head of Learning at LitLab.ai

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[1] Saha, N. M., Cutting, L. E., Del Tufo, S. N., & Bailey, S. (2021). Initial validation of a measure of decoding difficulty as a unique predictor of miscues and passage reading fluency. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(5), 404–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2020.1817093

[2] Mesmer, H. A. E. (2008). Tools for matching readers to texts: Research-based practices. New York, NY: Guilford Press.