EngEd 275 – Nicole Kavajecz – Week 5 – Chapter 3
Assessments, both formal and informal, directly inform and guide each teacher’s instruction. The use of various forms of assessment are important to meet the needs of the student, requirements of the district, as well as the needs of the teacher. Running records is a tool used to monitor student progress in an informal way. These records can lead the teacher to use a mini-lesson in a small group way or individually for more individualized instruction and assessment of skill. Book talks on a particular text can give the teacher a better format to assess student understanding and knowledge application.
There are 4 steps to assessment.
Step 1: Planning for assessment involves discovering what the students know, determining what types of assessment the teacher wants them to know, are they completing their work, and aides in the teacher being able to use assessments wisely.
Step 2: Monitoring students’ progress is vital to student success. Making observations, taking anecdotal notes, having conferences and making/completing checklists are all ways of monitoring this progress. When used appropriately, teachers can easily determine the need for more individualized instruction with appropriate students.
Step 3: Evaluating students’ learning means making judgements about student understanding, ability, and at this stage it is often summative. Using student work samples (portfolios), rubrics (a graph that indicates varying levels of progress), and multi-modal assessments appropriately is essential to evaluating effectively.
Step 4: Reflecting on students’ learning is the final and possibly the most important step to starting this process over again. Teachers take all the lessons they have learned about the student assessments and use it to direct their next instruction.
Administration of diagnostic tests is an important part of the process. Tests indicate student’s current reading level. Teachers must match books with students at appropriate levels of difficulty so students are challenged but not overwhelmed by the text. There are three main levels of reading which a student might fall into in reference to a particular text: frustration, instructional, and independent. Frustration Reading Level are too difficult for a student to read successfully, even with assistance. Students will tend to give up if improperly matched, so the teacher should re-choose a better selection. Instructional Reading Level books still require some assistance and guidance by the teacher for the student to be successful, but they are successful with this support. Independent Reading Levels are reached when a student can read a text at their own pace without help, at 95% or above accuracy of fluency and comprehension. Teachers use leveled books to inform their matches, such as Fountas and Pinnell’s levels, scholastic levels, and Lexile Framework are just a few examples. With Lexile, the framework used measures both students’ reading levels and the difficulty of the book, with scores from 100-1300 (K-12 grades).
A few other types of assessing students’ reading level are informal reading inventories and miscue analysis. Informal reading inventories are commercially available, and give a snapshot of the student’s ability. Particularly in word identification, oral reading fluency, and comprehension, these inventories can provide a teacher valuable insight into the ability of the student. Miscue analysis is another commercially available chart, where the teacher would mark what words the child struggled with, what they said instead, and how they struggled with it.
It is important to nurture students whose primary language is not English, and remember they often learn best from more read-alouds and reading aloud themselves. Oral lauguage assessments are useful and commercially developed. There is a SOLOM available (Student Oral Language Observation Matrix), which a rating scale which teachers can mark where the ELL student might be throughout various times in the year with their English speaking skills. This inventory takes into account the 5 components of oral language: listening, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. Another tool a teacher can use to support these, and all, students is a K-W-L chart (Know, Want to know, Learned).
An important process to remember is to involve students in the assessment process. It’s a face-value point that the student will ‘take the test’, but even more importantly is that a teacher helps students develop test-taking strategies. Especially for high-stakes testing which often students experience anxiety about. A great positive place to start is to allow students to take part in their own portfolio assessments through having a conference to grade the work with the teacher. Real classroom experience of mine has proven that this helps the students take greater ownership of the process, and be proud of their work (or in some cases realize they need to work harder).
References
Tompkins, G. E., Smith, C., Campbell, R., & Green, D. (2019). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (Seventh ed.). Melbourne, VIC: Pearson Australia.
