Chapter 3: Assessing Literacy Development

Running Records: listening to children reread familiar books to monitor their ability to recognize high-frequency words, decode unfamiliar words, and use reading strategies. This is a way to assess a student’s reading progress by systematically evaluating a student’s oral reading and identifying error patterns. 

Minilessons: Teachers teach, short focused lessons, called minilessons on literacy strategies and skills. Topics include how to write an entry in a reading log, use commas in a series, draw inferences, and use sentence combining. In these lessons, teachers introduce a topic and connect it to the reading or writing students are in involved in, provide information, and supervise as students practice the topic. Minilessons usually last 15-30 minutes and some teachers extend the lesson over several days.

Steps of a minilesson:

Classroom Assessment

Step 1: Planning for assessment

Teachers plan for assessment at the same time they’re planning for instruction. They think about these questions and choose the assessment tools they’ll use to get answers:

• Are any students struggling to understand?
• Are students completing assignments?
• Are students exhibiting good work habits?
• Have students learned the concepts that have been taught?

By planning for assessment before they begin teaching, teachers are prepared to use assessment tools wisely; otherwise, classroom assessment often turns out to be haphazard and inpromtu. 

Step 2: Monitoring Students’ Progress

Monitoring is vital to student success. Teachers monitor students’ learning everyday and use the results to make instructional decisions. As they monitor students’ progress through observations, conferences, and other informal, formative procedures, teachers learn about students and their individual strengths and weaknesses and about the impact of their instruction. 

To monitor students’ progress, teachers observe, make anecdotal notes, have conferences and checklists to understand the student progress. 

Anecdotal Notes:Teachers write brief notes in notebooks or on self-stick notes as they observe students. The most useful notes describe specific events, report rather than evaluate, and relate the events to other information about the student.

Book Talk: Book Talk Checklist shows a teacher’s evaluation of a fourth grade’s book talk; the student grade was B.  At the beginning of the school year, the teacher introduced book talks, modeled how to do one, and developed the checklist with the students. Students use the checklist whenever they’re preparing to give a book talk, and the teacher uses it as a rating scale to evaluate the effectiveness of their book talks. 

Step 3: Evaluating Students’ Learning

Teachers document students’ learning to make judgments about their achievement. At this stage, the assessment is summative. Tests are a traditional way to evaluate students’ learning, but most teachers prefer to evaluate students’ actual reading and writing to make judgments about their achievement. 

Rubrics:Teachers use rubrics, or scoring guides, to evaluate student performance according to specific criteria and levels of achievement. 

Portfolios: Students also collected their best work in portfolios to document their own learning and accomplishments.

Step 4: Reflection on Students’ Learning 

Teachers reflect on their instruction to improve their teaching effectiveness. They ask themselves questions about lessons that were successful and those they weren’t and how they might adapt instruction to meet their students’ needs. They also analyze students’ achievement, because teachers aren’t effective if students aren’t learning. 

Determining Students’ Reading Levels

Guided Reading: is an instructional approach that involves a teacher working with a small group of readers.During the lesson, the teacher provides a text that students can read with support, coaching the learners as they use problem-solving strategies to read the text. 

Leveled Books: To match students to book in grades K-8, Fountas and Pinnell, developed a text gradient, or classification system that arranges books along a 26-level continuum from easiest to hardest. Their system is based on these variables that influence reading difficulty:

Lexile Framework: Another approach to matching books to readers in the Lexile Framework developed by MetaMetrics. This approach is different because it’s used to measure both students’ reading levels and the difficulty level of books. Word familiarity and sentence complexity are the two factors used to determine the difficulty level of books. Lexile sores range from 100 to 1300, representing kindergarten through 12^thgrade reading levels. 

Informal Reading Inventories: commercial tests to evaluate students’ reading performance. The can be used at first through eighth grade levels, but first grade teachers often find that IRIs don’t provide as much useful information about beginning readers as running records do. Teachers use IRIs to identify struggling students’ instructional needs, particularly in the areas of word identification, oral reading fluency, and comprehension. 

Miscue Analysis: its purpose is to understand the reading process. It is a diagnostic tool that helps researchers/teachers gain insight into the reading process. The student’s miscues are classified and charted down. Only words that students mispronounce or substitute can be analyzed.

SOLOM: an authentic assessment tool that many teachers use is the Student Oral Language Observation Matrix. The SOLOM is a rating scale that teachers use to assess students’ command of English as they observe them talking and listening in a real, day-to-day classroom activities. The SOLOM addresses five components of oral language.

KWL Chart: is a graphical organizer designed to help in learning.The letters KWL are an acronym, for what students, in the course of a lesson, already know, want to know, and ultimately learn. The KWL chart is divided into three columns. 

High-Stakes Testing: These tests are designed to objectively measure students’ knowledge according to grade level standards. High-stakes testing is different than classroom assessment. The test scores typically provide little information for making day-to-day instructional decisions, but students, teachers, administrators, and schools are judged and held accountable by the results. 

Test Taking Strategies: 

Portfolio Assessment:Students collect their work in portfolios and use them to evaluate their progress and showcase their best work. These systematic and meaningful collections of artifacts document students’ literacy development over a period of time. Students select the pieces to be placed in their portfolios, and in the process they learn to establish criteria for their selections. Portfolios help students, teacher, and parents see patterns of growth from one literacy milestone to another in ways that aren’t possible with other types of assessment. 

Application to the Classroom:

Chapter 3 has some very useful terms and ideas that would benefit my future classroom. I really enjoyed reading through the 4 steps of assessment. As a future educator, it is vital that we understand and use many different ways to assess our students. We need to make sure we are documenting students progress, evaluate their learning and reflect on their learning. Teachers are not effective if students aren’t learning, so as teachers our main job is to make sure that students are learning and understanding the content we are teaching in our classrooms. Back in elementary school, we used to have reading levels and participate in KWL charts often. KWL charts help students with learning and can be used often in a classroom setting. Reading levels are also important, because it helps us as teachers, help our students pick the proper books for them to read. Within my classroom, I also want to display test-taking strategies that I know will help my students. There are many ideas and concepts within chapter 3 that would benefit my future classroom.

UW Superior Teacher Education Program

Lesson Plan Template

Notes:

• Download the lesson plan template from resource center or teacher will provide the template within the class.
• In the Prior Knowledge and Conceptions part, be as specific as possible. 
• You need to be proactive when giving students objectives. 
• In expectations for student learning we are NOT addressing student behavior or student participation. Focus on learning objective. 
• When doing group work, monitor the whole group
• Feedback isn’t a grade its scaffolding
• During the Launch/Hook, we want to engage our students (60 seconds)
• Explore section SHOULD read like a cookbook!
• Close the lesson without just excusing them to their next class.
• Attach materials to the resources part of the lesson. If using a text, cite the text.