4 Steps of Assessment
Classroom and student assessment is one of the most important aspects of teaching. Classroom assessment drives instruction and ensures that students are making adequate progress, determines the effectiveness of the teacher’s instruction, and documents students’ achievement. These assessments involve four steps:
Step 1: Planning for Assessment
Teachers plan for assessments at the same time they are planning their instruction. Planning for assessment before they begin teaching helps them be prepared to use assessment tool more wisely and because if they don’t their assessments often turn out to be haphazard, impromptu, and ineffective. Some questions for this stage are:
- Are any students struggling to understand?
- Are students completing assignments?
- Have students learned the concepts that have been taught?
- Can students apply what they’ve learned in authentic literacy projects?
Step 2: Monitoring Students’ Progress
Teachers monitor students’ progress to both learn about students’ strengths and weakness as well as to make informative instructional decisions. They do this by using observations, anecdotal notes, conferences, and checklists.
- Observation – These observations teachers use to monitor students is more about what the students are doing as they read and write and not about behavior. They often observe a specific group each day so they can observe the whole class over the course of the week.
- Anecdotal Notes – These are notes teachers write on sticky notes or in notebooks as they observe students. They usually describe specific events, and they report rather than evaluate the information. They also record the questions students ask, the strategies and skills they use fluently and those they don’t understand, and reading and writing activities. The notes document growth and pinpoint problem areas to address in future lessons.
- Conferences – Many times throughout the day, teachers will meet and talk with students. These conferences are to monitor their progress, set goals, and help them solve problems. On-the-spot conferences are when a teacher will briefly meet at students’ desks to check on their work or progress. There are also planning conferences where the student and teacher meet and make plans, revising conferences where a group of students meet with the teacher to go over their rough drafts to seek advice, book discussion conferences to discuss a book they’ve read, editing conferences to review and correct their works, and evaluation conferences to reflect on their accomplishments and goals.
- Checklists – These simplify assessment and enhance students’ learning. Teachers will identify evaluation criteria in advance to make it easier and fairer for themselves and the students. One example of a checklist for assessment is with a Book Talk. During a Book Talk, a student gives a short presentation to the other students about a book they’ve read and often times the purpose is to try to convince them to read it. These are a great way for teachers to monitor students in many different categories.
Step 3: Evaluating Students’ Learning
At this step, teachers evaluate students’ learning to make judgements about their achievement. Teachers will evaluate student’s learning by administering tests, looking at work samples, using rubrics, and other ways that students demonstrate learning. One way they evaluate students’ learning is by looking at students’ work samples like audio files of them reading, pictures of projects they’ve completed, reading logs, and portfolios of their best work. Teachers also use rubrics or scoring guides to evaluate student performance. Rubrics are scoring guides that are used to evaluate student performance according to specific criteria and levels of achievement. These rubrics specify what students are expected to do and describe specific criteria the students are expected to learn and do. Students can also use rubrics to self-assess their own work and work with classmates to assess each other’s works. There are also multimodal assessments teachers are encouraged to use to broaden their evaluations. Teachers should also consider the literacy strategies the students employs, the variety of print and digital text students read, the digital resources students use, students’ ability to collaborate with classmates, and the multiple ways students orally, verbally, and in their writings demonstrate their learning.
Step 4: Reflecting on students’ Learning
In step 4, teachers reflect on their own instruction, and they analyze students’ achievements to improve their teaching effectiveness. They ask themselves questions about lessons that were either successful or unsuccessful to see if any adaptations may be needed to meet their students’ needs. Another way effective teachers reflect on their students’ learning is by student evaluations. These evaluations are done after the lessons or units have been taught and tests have been taken. Students will answer upon and reflect upon questions like: What did you learn during this lesson? How could your teacher have improved your learning? How did you contribute to the classroom community of learners? And what would you like to get better at? These evaluations are not graded, help students create goals for the next unit, and help teachers provide more effective lessons in the future.
Diagnostic Tests and Determining Students’ Reading Levels
Teachers use diagnostic tests to inform their instruction by using them to determine students’ reading levels and identify struggling readers’ strengths and weaknesses. Teachers then differentiate instruction based on their findings and match students with books at appropriate levels of difficulty. If books are too easy students won’t be challenged and if books are too hard students get frustrated. There are three reading levels that consider students’ ability to recognize words automatically, read fluently, and comprehend the message.
- Independent Reading Level – At this level students read books comfortably on their own. They recognize almost all words, read accurately with a 95-100% rate, read fluently, and comprehend what they’re reading. These books are slightly easier than instructional leveled books and they still engage the students’ interest.
- Instructional Reading Level – At this level students read books with support, but not on their own. They recognize most words with an accuracy rate of 90-94% and may be fluent but sometimes isn’t. Students comprehend what they’re reading with other students and the teachers help but not independently.
- Frustration Reading Level – Books at this level are too difficult for students to read successfully even with assistance. Students don’t recognize enough words automatically and their accuracy is less that 90%. Their reading is also choppy, word by word, and often doesn’t make sense to them.
Students must also be assessed regularly to determine their reading levels and monitor their progress as well as informing teacher instruction. Teachers also consider students current levels and provide developmentally appropriate instruction too. This is one reason teachers teach guided reading groups while conducting literature focus units. During these guided readings, everyone is exposed to grade level texts while also reading at their instructional level. The children sit near the teacher in a group while they provide explicit instruction and support for reading hard texts.
Leveled Books – To match students to books in grades K-8, a text gradient or classification system was developed that arranged books along a 26-level continuum from easiest to hardest. Some of the variables considered that influence reading difficulty are:
- Genre and format of the book
- Organization and use of text structures
- Familiarity and interest level of the content
- Complexity of ideas and theme
- Language and literacy features
- Sophistications of the vocabulary
- World length and ease of decoding
- Relationship of illustrations relationship of illustrations to the text
- The length of the book, its layout, and another picture features
Lexile Framework – The lexile framework is another approach to matching books to readers. This approach is different because it is used to measure both reading levels and the difficulty of the book. Word familiarity and sentence complexity are the two factors used to determine the difficulty of books. There are also websites available to use to check out some of the 200,000 books available to you by skill level.
Diagnosing Students’ Strengths and Weaknesses
Teachers use diagnostic assessments and tools to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, examine areas of difficulty, and decide how to modify instruction to meet students’ needs. They often use diagnostic tests to determine a student’s achievement level for phonics, fluency, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension and other literacy components.
Running Records – These are authentic assessment tools that demonstrate how students read using their regular reading materials as teachers make a detailed account. They check their word identification and reading fluency, as well as students’ ability to read words correctly.
Informal Reading Inventories – Informal Reading Inventories are commercial tests to evaluate students’ reading performance. They can be used from first through eighth grade. The reading tests are very popular because they are often used to tell us whether a student is or isn’t reading at grade level. Teachers can also use informal reading inventories to identify struggling students’ instructional needs, oral reading fluency, and comprehension. The tests usually consist of two parts: graded word lists and passages.
SOLOM – SOLOM stands for the Student Oral Language Observation Matrix. This assessment tool is a rating scale that teachers use to assess students command of English as they observe them talking and listening in real, day to day classroom activities. The SOLOM address five components of oral language: listening, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciations, and grammar.
- Listening – Teachers score students along a continuum from unable to comprehend simple statements to understanding everyday conversations
- Fluency – Teachers score students along a continuum from halting, fragmentary speech to fluent speech, approximating that of native speakers
- Vocabulary -Teachers sore students along a continuum from extremely limited word knowledge to using words and idioms skillfully
- Pronunciation – Teachers score students along a continuum from virtually unintelligible speech to using pronunciation and intonation proficiently similar to native speakers
- Grammar – Teacher score students along a continuum from excessive errors that make speech unintelligible to applying word order, grammar, and usage rules effectively
K-W-L Charts – Because English learners have less background knowledge about topics in books they’re reading, it’s important for teachers to have students background knowledge so they can modify their teaching to meet the students’ needs. One way to do this is with a KWL chart. A KWL chart is chart where the students, and sometimes the teacher, write down things they know about a subject, things they want to learn about a subject, and then things they learned about a subject. When going over the KWL chart, teachers learn what students know about a topic and they have an opportunity to learn, build additional background knowledge, and introduce related vocabulary.
High–Stakes Testing – In America, high-stakes testing is emphasized with the goal of improving the quality of reading instruction. These tests are designed to measure students’ knowledge according to grade level standards and to help identify problem areas for important educational decisions. However, students feel pressured by these tests, they don’t try harder to succeed, they become stressed and pressured which effects motivation and achievement, and these tests can lead teachers to abandon their balanced approach to learning while focusing just on test related subjects and strategies.
When students are preparing for test taking, there are a few strategies that will help them. Students should:
- 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
- Stick with your first answer
- Pace yourself
- Check your work carefully
Students should use these test taking strategies along with other reading strategies like determining importance, questioning and rereading when they’re taking standardized tests.
Portfolio Assessment – Portfolios are a great way to students to evaluate their progress and showcase their best work. They can also be used at conferences with parents and to supplement the information provided by report cards as well. These help students, teachers, and parents see patterns of growth from on literacy milestone to another in many different ways that aren’t possible through other types of assessments. Other benefits of portfolio assessments are that students feel ownership of their work, they become more responsible about their work, they set goals and are motivated to work toward accomplishing them, and students make connections between learning and assessing.
Classroom Application –
Two bits of information that stuck with me this week were the parts about assessment, observations, and evaluations and about the different diagnostic tests for reading evaluations. We have all had to take many different assessments, tests, and quizzes in our life, but we may not have had or had to do many evaluations. I especially want to learn more about these evaluations and how they can be used to produce a more effective future lesson. I really like the idea of asking the students what they learned, if they think it went well and how it could have gone better, some of the things they didn’t like, etc… I think these evaluations will have a great impact on whether or not parts of the lesson need to be retaught or adjustments to be made for future lessons. Another part I found interesting regards all the different tests for reading evaluations. One thing I am not familiar with just yet is how to administer reading evaluations, how to score them, and what the different levels mean. There are also many different programs for reading evaluations and I am truly excited to learn more about these both for myself as a teacher and a father.
Travis Davis ENGED 275 