Running Records are records that are taken throughout the year to see where students were and how that compliments where they are now. In this example, it’s taking notes and monitoring a child’s ability to recognize high-frequency words, decode unfamiliar words, and use reading strategies. They are used in Fluency, and Word Identification.
Minilessons are lessons that can be performed in small groups or in a class as a whole, and are only around 20 minutes long. They work great for younger children who don’t always have the attention span for a long lesson.
Assessment is formative, providing immediate feedback and is generally ongoing, evaluation is summative; it’s final and is generally at the end of a year/semester etc.
Assessment involves four steps: planning, monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting.
- Planning: This is the time where teachers look into the student learning objectives and pull out any necessary information that will assist in the assessments of lessons. The teacher has to think about what were students struggling to understand, what do they need to understand.
- Observations: The teacher will monitor students during this step. Check in on their progress through observations, conferences, and other informal formative strategies to see exactly where students strengths and weaknesses are. Anecdotal notes: small notes teachers write about student’s reading and writing activities, questions students ask, or strategies and skills they may need work in etc. Checklists can be used during this step to simplify and keep the assessment on track. A Book talk: is when someone sits in front of the class, shows the book to students, states the title and author, then summarizes the book without giving away the ending. It is supposed to entice students to want to read that particular book.
- Evaluating Students’ Learning: There are many different ways to evaluate such as tests or writing and reading samples during this step. Students’ work samples are commonly taken, these include, audio files of them reading aloud, lists of books they’ve read, reading logs, writing samples, photos of projects, and flash drives with digital projects, students can choose to place their best work into their portfolios which can be looked at later down the road to check for improvements in work or to show off above average work. Rubrics are scoring guides which lay out the specific criteria that will be expected for different levels of performance.
- Reflecting on Students’ Learning: Reflection is a large part of assessment as it is used for both teachers and students to learn and gather information from. Here the teacher can check to see if the assessment was successful, and to see what students thoughts are on their own habits and achievements.
Independent Reading Levels are students personal level held comfortably on their own with their accuracy rate at 95-100%. Here they recognize almost all the words, are fluent, and comprehend what they are reading.
Instructional Reading Level is where they recognize most words, have some support, and accuracy rate is 90-94%.
Frustration Reading Level is when the text is too difficult for students to read on their own successfully, even with assistance. Students don’t recognize enough words, their accuracy is less than 90%. The reading is choppy and word by word, and sometimes doesn’t even make sense.
When the level of reading is near the Frustration level, Guided Reading is necessary and can be done with partners, small groups, or with the teacher reading too. Students should not be left alone here as they will just become overwhelmed.
Leveled books have been developed to assist young readers grades K-8. There are 26 classifications/levels that arrange books from easiest to hardest so that students can easily find one that is within their range of comfort and reading ability. Fountas and Pinnell (2006) used these variables to design this:
- Genre and format of the book
- Organization and use of text structures
- Familiarity and interest level of the content
- Complexity of ideas and themes
- Language and literary features
- Sentence length and complexity
- Sophistication of the vocabulary
- Word length and ease of decoding
- Relationship of illustrations to the text
- Length of the book, its layout, and other print features
The Lexile Framework is another approach used for matching books to readers. This approach measures both students reading level and the difficulty level of books. Two of the factors used to measure the difficulty of books are word familiarity and sentence complexity. Scores range from 100 to 1300, representign K-12.
Miscue Analysis: is an assessment used to show when a student correctly or incorrectly substitutes, repeats, mispronounces, or doesn’t know certain words. They are charted on what is known as a “Miscue Analysis” so they can be easily interpreted, analyzed, and understood.
Informal reading inventories are used from first grade through eighth. They evaluate student’s reading performance and are often used as a screening instrument to determine whether the students are reading at a certain grade level. Running records are generally more useful in the first grade though. They can also be used to identify if students are struggling with word identification, oral reading fluency, and comprehension. They consist of two parts, word lists and reading passages.
Student Oral Language Observation Matrix (SOLOM) is used to asses students who speak a language other than English to determine their English language proficiency. It assesses 5 components of oral language:
- Listening
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Pronunciation
- Grammar
KWL Chart: (What I know, What I want to know, What I learned) These are charts that teachers can complete with ELL’s to learn more about their backgrounds and knowledge of reading and writing. This will enable the teacher to have a better understanding of the student in general and be able to mold the instruction to fit the student.
High Stakes Testing is done annually in the US with the goal of improving the quality of reading instruction. The tests are designed to objectively measure students’ knowledge according to grade-level standards. Some Test-taking strategies are
- Read the entire question first
- Look for key words in the question
- Read all answer choices before choosing the correct answer
- Answer easier questions first
- Make smart guesses (aka eliminate answers you know aren’t right)
- Stick with your first answer
- Pace yourself
- Check your work carefully
Portfolio Assessments: Student portfolios hold students most prized work, and by having that work assessed it really is to respect the student and their work. Here the teacher can assess where the student is related to the SLO’s for this particular level of class. Also they can be used at parent teacher conferences to show and supplement information provided on report cards. Teachers can also use these portfolios to set goals with students and to talk about their own self-assessment.
virginiawilson 