Importance of Assessment in Elementary Reading Programs

Envision the classroom you would like to have in the future. Are all the students learning at their own pace, using the information of where they are right now to inform your practices and groupings OR is it only whole group with very little addressing of individual needs or skills that need to be developed? It is my hope that your answer was the former, as this is the way that the highest number of student needs can be addressed. This kind of classroom can only be achieved with excellent planning, assessment and classroom management at the forefront.

Developing reading skills should be a core element of elementary school teaching. In order to gain the most mileage from planning, including the three kinds of assessment is necessary in your classroom.

You can only reliably implement/impart assessment if you:

1. Know your material and standards.

2.  Begin with the end in mind.

3.  Design material to appropriately meet and measure achievement of these standards / levels of performance and understanding.

4.  Interpret the data to inform planning in a timely manner.

5.  Communicate with parents and students in a timely and transparent manner.

Of course you need to make sure that the assessments are high enough in quality and amount, that data can be used to make conclusions. Good assessment in reading then needs to be at the forefront of your classroom.

The three different kinds of assessment with examples you can use for your reading program, are listed below.

 Assessment for Learning

This type of assessment is used to get an idea of where students are right now. It is often preliminary and done at the beginning of a unit or topic of study. Teachers can use this sort of assessment information to get an idea of the knowledge, understanding or misconceptions that students are starting with. A teacher can use this information to explore where they need to go with students next (for instruction as a class, a group or individually).

Tools you might use for this type of assessment include: CASI, Running Records, word assessment surveys (for detecting where students are struggling in decoding words), quizzes, worksheets, question cards, anecdotal notes during group and pair discussions.

Assessment as Reading

This type of assessment is used to try and get students to think metacognatively about their own work. Students need to learn how to ask themselves the right questions, make the right connections and realistically know their strengths and weaknesses. They also learn problem solving strategies.

Tools you might use for this type of assessment include: reading conferences, two stars and a wish, reflective writing, reflective dialogue, student – teacher conferencing, portfolios

As Lorna Earl suggests in Assessment as Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximise Student Learning, assessment as learning should be at the forefront of the teaching classroom. Assessment as learning empowers students to recognize and discuss their strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement. It gives them a sense of ownership and enables teachers to step back, do less telling and have much richer dialogue and discussion with students. Of course students do not learn these skills on their own, which necessitates modelling.

Assessment of Reading

This type of assessment is often what shows up on report cards. It usually comes at the end of a unit of study. It informs teachers if students have mastered the material. Assessments can come in many forms (including tests and worksheets), however often the best way of demonstrating their understanding is in authentic tasks. For example – writing a letter to the city about why an area should not be developed for environmental reasons, creating a puppet show, creating a brochure advertising their favourite book or creating a cooking show for kids and utilizing procedural writing. Wherever possible students should have choice in how they demonstrate their knowledge. Although choice sometimes involves more work for the teacher, it honors the different ways that students learn, accumulate, assimilate and synthesize information. The key is that whatever assessment you come up with is an accurate way of assessing the standards and gives enough information to come to a conclusion about whether or not the student understood the material, skill or comprehension strategy.

Three questions I would like to leave you my blog readers with are:

* How can you use assessment to inform descriptive feedback?

* If you find that a group of students share a particular misconception after assessment for learning, what can you do in order to best solve the problem?

* If students are unable to think well about their work in a metacognitive sense, what tools could you create to help them?

It is my hope that everyone reading this will consider the above information and utilize it in their classrooms today or in the future. For further information about reading assessment, please watch the video I made below: