Abstract: Described and disclosed herein are embodiments of systems, methods and computer program products for determining a grapho-phonetic strategy (GPS) metric that informs how far a particular word-reading error is from the target word and explains where the breakdown occurred. For example, if a person saw the word “cat” and mis-read it as “cap” the GPS metric would be low, suggesting that this particular error was not that far from the target word. However, if a person mis-read “cat” as “climb” the GPS metric would be higher because they only read the initial sound correctly. The GPS metric can be calculated for each mispronounced word in a passage and totaled to yield a passage score. The GPS metric can also be used to develop a tailored improvement process for the person.