Assessing Readers

Qualitative Diagnosis and Instruction, Second Edition

Rona Flippo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136311741
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

A Co-publication of Routledge and the International Reading Association

This new edition of Assessing Readers continues to bridge the gap between authentic, informal, and formative assessments, and more traditional quantitative, and summative assessment approaches. At the heart of the book is respect and confidence in the capabilities of knowledgeable teachers to make the correct literacy decisions for the students they teach based on appropriate assessments. Inclusive and practical, it supports individual classroom teachers' knowledge, beliefs, decisions, and roles and offers specific assessment, instruction, and organizational ideas and strategies, while incorporating a range of perspectives that inform the field of reading and literacy education, covering the most important ideas and information found in more traditional reading diagnosis books.

Changes in the Second Edition

• Addresses the Common Core State Standards

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• Includes Response to Intervention (RTI)

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• Discusses family literacy in language-diverse homes and the needs of ELL students

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• Covers formative assessment

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• Offers ideas and guidelines for ELL assessment

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• Looks at issues of accountability and teaching to prescribed state tests and objectives versus accommodating to them – the pitfalls and problems and how to cope

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• Provides new practical examples, including new rubrics, more teacher-developed cognitive assessments, a new case study, and new teacher-developed strategy lessons

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PART ONE

Assessment and Analysis in the Classroom

one

The Classroom Teacher’s Role

Focus and Goals of the Chapter

To provide a general overview of classroom assessment

To demonstrate the importance of linguistic experience

To demonstrate the importance of cognitive experience

To show the power of affective influences, and cultural, sociocultural, and family literacy

To differentiate between qualitative and quantitative data

To describe the differences between formative and summative assessment

To show the importance of the classroom teacher as a decision maker who will decide what to assess and how to assess it.

Introduction

Classroom teachers must make many decisions as they plan their instructional programs. These decisions will be based on their beliefs of what should be taught and how it should be done, tempered with information from teacher education courses and workshops, professional readings and meetings, teaching experiences, and their own unique classroom situations and demands. This is to be valued. This book is dedicated to the idea that, like the individual children we teach, classroom teachers are individuals and must be respected to make appropriate decisions.

This chapter presents the importance of the teacher’s role in the reading and broader literacy assessment process. One series of decisions that teachers must make relates to what and how they will test or assess children for reading instruction. This chapter discusses aspects of this assessment and decision-making process and describes some areas teachers should consider as they review assessment options. These areas include linguistic experience (a child’s experience with language), cognitive experience (a child’s existing knowledge and related experience), strategy use (how a child seems to go about trying to figure out a word or the meaning of something the child has read, or how to do an assignment), and affective influences (the child’s interests, motivations, attitudes, and self-image). All of these areas are also influenced by individual cultural and sociocultural considerations (unique qualities, lifestyles, and values). Additionally, teachers will have to devise or select tests or procedures to make assessments of these and other selected areas. This chapter addresses these considerations and suggests a model for the classroom teacher’s important decision-making role.

In order to avoid confusion regarding the use of terms, the words “testing” or “reading test(s)” will be synonymous in this book with “assessing” and “reading assessment(s).” Classroom teachers should be aware, however, that assessment is generally thought of as a much broader term than testing. In fact, assessment encompasses testing but also includes all the informal as well as more formal procedures and observations that teachers use to inform their teaching.

What Is Assessment?

The term assessment includes all observations, samplings, and other informal and formal, written, oral, or performance-type testing that a teacher might do in order to gather information about a child’s abilities, interests, motivations, feelings, attitudes, strategies, skills, and special cultural or sociocultural considerations. As it relates to reading and other literacy areas, assessment enables a teacher to gather meaningful information (or data) concerning or impacting the child’s reading of school-related assignments, as well as of independent materials. Assessment is an ongoing process and should involve multiple sources, including, but not limited to, the teacher’s, students’, and parents’/families’ observations and efforts. Finally, assessment goes hand in hand with instruction and learning. As teachers teach, they observe and accommodate for students, as well as continually assess and reflect on children’s development. As children learn, they self-assess and reflect on their work and their developing strategies. (More discussion regarding the multiple dimensions of valid, fair, and equitable assessment is provided in Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing, a publication prepared by the International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English Joint Task Force on Assessment [IRA and NCTE, 2010].)

Evaluation involves making use of assessment information to make judgments about the quality of children’s work and performance. Evaluation is a natural follow-up to assessment. When we assess over time, we analyze and evaluate the information gathered and observed, and we begin to draw conclusions and make decisions based on that information. Like assessment, evaluation needs to be flexible, reflective, and ongoing so that we are always willing to learn more about students, formulating new judgments and opinions as students develop and learn. In this book, the term analysis will be used to indicate an open, flexible, reflective, and ongoing type of evaluation process.

Assessment and analysis can be done in so many ways, both formally and informally. In fact, most teachers do assessment and analysis all the time. For instance, when Tara is seen rubbing her eyes while reading, and moving a book closer to her face, the teacher observes, assesses, and decides that Tara might have a vision problem. Or, when Todd is observed looking out the window, yawning, and otherwise looking uninterested whenever the science book is being read, the teacher assesses and concludes that Todd doesn’t seem interested in science or, at least, isn’t motivated by that science book. Likewise, when the teacher observes Molly reading one word at a time and making tremendous efforts to pronounce each sound in each word, the teacher assesses and analyzes that Molly relies heavily on her phonics decoding strategies. These assessments, though informal and observational, can be just as useful as teacher-made written assessments. For instance, the written test of matching phonic sounds with pictures of objects representing those sounds also may indicate that Molly knows her phonics. Or, the science test covering a recently assigned chapter of the text might indicate that Todd didn’t understand the chapter or didn’t read it.

Of course, all assessments can overlook certain information, and not all assessments are necessarily excellent or even good. For example, perhaps Todd is extremely interested in science, but is turned off by just reading about it in a textbook; for him, doing science hands-on through experiments and other work is best. While the previous examples about Todd (observational and written) indicate a problem with science, the teacher may draw an incomplete or inaccurate evaluation from the data collected because each assessment missed some of what was involved. Would a more formal, standardized assessment have told the teacher more? Maybe, but probably not everything. For instance, at the end of the first half of the school year, suppose the teacher gave Todd a standardized test covering the first half-year of the science curriculum used by the school district for fourth graders. What would the teacher find? Perhaps that Todd wasn’t familiar with the topics already covered, but this still doesn’t help her figure out why Todd doesn’t know the material or help her do a better job of teaching him science.

The point is that teachers need to do many assessments of all kinds to find out what they particularly want to find out about children’s abilities, strategies, skills, interests, and motivations. Teachers also need to be open and reflective concerning the assessment information they collect; new information can change the analysis or conclusions reached. Additionally, teachers are making assessments all the time, some planned and many unplanned. No one assessment is likely to give a teacher all the necessary information. No one kind of assessment is probably best or worst. However, professional classroom teachers, who are good decision makers, can design or plan assessments to purposefully find out what they want to find out, if they can first identify the areas or things they wish to assess.

What Should Be Assessed?

This is the big question! In the first paragraph of this chapter, the point was made that classroom teachers will make decisions regarding what they want to teach or emphasize in their classrooms based on their knowledge, experience, and situations. Once teachers know what they want to teach or emphasize, then they can plan how to assess it. Remember, first decide “what,” and then you will be able to design “how.” Later in this chapter, in Box 1.1, “A Model for the Classroom Teacher’s Decision Making” is presented to help you chart your own course.

Teachers should also consider the following areas that impact children’s reading.

Linguistic Experience and Strategies

Linguistic experience, or a child’s experience with language, includes all aspects of language development and acquisition: listening, speaking, print awareness, writing, and reading. Children develop their language or linguistic experiences from birth on. A baby learns to identify certain phrases produced by his mother or other caregiver as having meaning: “Are you wet? Here, let me change you.” Invariably these phrases lead to a dry diaper and comfort. Or the baby cries and learns that his cries lead to being fed. Later, when the nine-month-old makes certain sounds, like “ma-ma,” he’s rewarded with his mother’s smile and such words as “That’s good! Here’s ma-ma! Say ma-ma again!” Later, certain print or symbols identify good things to eat. Logos for McDonald’s, Dairy Queen, or a favorite kind of cookie are easy to spot. (Note: This environmental print, or the words on objects and places in our environment, which seem to be all around us as we move through our daily lives, routines, and activities.) Mommy leaves a note for Grandma, in case she comes over while we are at the store. When Mother takes a shopping list to the store and refers to it to see what groceries to buy, some of the symbols mean a favorite box of cereal is purchased. At bedtime, the book Mother reads has words on each page; as she turns the pages, a story is told. The young child understands the story because it fits the familiar syntax (structure or phrasing of language), semantic (meaning of language), and phoneme–grapheme (sound and look of language) relationships he has been hearing, speaking, and becoming aware of since birth.

All linguistic experience is powerful and should be respected. It is important for a teacher to recognize that some (or even many) of his or her students may represent diverse early linguistic experience. English language learners (ELLs), students whose linguistic experience has been in a language other than English, will use syntax, phoneme-grapheme sounds and symbols, and semantic information that may differ from those used in English. Linguistic diversity will certainly inform the nature of assessment and evaluation for ELLs, and will be discussed in the following chapters of this book. When children begin school, they come to kindergarten or first grade with considerable linguistic experience. The classroom teacher can assess to what extent a child is using various linguistic experience or strategies by observing the child read, write, and speak. In Chapter 3, more information will be introduced to help classroom teachers with this assessment, but, for now, linguistic experience is suggested as an area it makes sense to assess.

Consider and React 1.1

Consider the following short paragraph, “The Marlup and His Prudat,” which was developed as a spin-off of a nonsense story first presented by Kenneth Goodman (1977). This little paragraph illustrates the importance of linguistic experience. Even though it contains nonsense words, your own linguistic experience with English syntax, semantics, and phoneme–grapheme relationships should help you make some sense of it. After you read the paragraph, try answering the literal comprehension questions that follow. How did you do?

The marlup was poving his frump. He was querving very grungy and felt charaffed. Why must things be like grift, he queried himself? Just last gruen I didn’t have this prudat. Now I can’t robun or zipdig anything.

Comprehension Questions on “The Marlup and his Prudat”

1. What did the marlup pove?

2. How was the marlup querving?

3. How did the marlup feel?

4. What did the marlup query himself?

5. When didn’t the marlup have this prudat?

6. What is the marl...