Assessment-Based Reading Instruction
CI 576
Learning Module
- Creator(s):
Reading Assessment and Instruction - what is the connection between reading assessment and instruction? A great place to begin is to think about the history of reading instruction:
Now, take a moment to think about summative and formative assessment. How do you see these forms of assessment reflected in the history of reading instruction?
In the video below, Dr. P. David Pearson speaks briefly about literacy assessment. Take a look at what he says as you reflect on the connections between the history of reading and the way in which we assess students in the 21st century.
Each of you has assessed students in some form. Often, these moments of assessment allow for instruction, as you may have seen in the case of formative assessments. However, often times, they do not, as your review of summative assessments and Dr. Pearson's video may have shown.
Over the next few weeks, we will work in Scholar to think more about how you connect assessment to instruction in your daily practice. This is about your process as a teacher, working with students in the authentic settings of your classrooms. For others of you, it will involve working as a tutor with a child who finds reading challenging. In this course, you will act as a knowledge creator, bringing your experiences with reading assessment from your classroom to our learning community. But let's start off with what you've done so far with reading assessment and instruction!
Comment: Reflect on a powerful experience where you connected reading assessment to instruction for a student or someone else with whom you worked. Share your experience and comment on 2-3 others' posts. As a reminder, when you comment on someone's work, always start with "@" followed by the person's name so this person knows you are referring to his or her post.
Often, in the course of your practice as teachers, you are provided with the reading and literacy assessments that you will use in your schools and districts. The American Federation of Teachers explains how this process might work. Having reading assessments provided to you by your districts typically means that you may not get a sense of how to select assessments based on the unique needs of your individual learners. While you think this may save you a face like this:
As a teacher, you do want to have the opportunity to select assessments on an ongoing basis.
To get a better sense of why this is necessary, identify a student in your class or a child that you know. Now, keeping the child's background and reading behaviors in mind, use the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) database to find 5 assessments that you believe might work best for your student. In selecting an assessment, what factors did you consider? In thinking about these factors, did peers play a role? Leigh Hall talks about how adolescent struggling readers' identity can be affected by peers.
Consider the student's motivation. Did this come into play as you thought about selection? Pitcher and colleagues talk about the potential impact of motivation on adolescent readers. Maria Protacio also considers motivation but she focuses on English learners.
Or did you think about the student's artistic abilities?
As you may now realize, many factors are at play that make the process of selecting appropriate assessments a very important one for the teacher. If you take a look at JoAnne Caldwell and Lauren Leslie's Intervention Strategies to Follow Informal Reading Inventory Assessment:So What Do I Do Now, Chapters 1 and 2 help to explain why. When assessments are not selected to target a specific student's needs, teachers may often overlook the principles of effective intervention and fail to get a holistic view of the child as a reader. This in turn can affect the intervention used and interfere with the tutoring process (see Fisher, Bates and Gurvitz for a discussion of the factors and principles in tutoring that may be affected).
You are in the process of selecting and administering assessments this week. You want to begin administering assessments immediately. Landauer, Deeney, Lonigan, and Flynn can help you with this process. They remind us of the role of technology in assessment, debates on fluency, the impact of different types of assessments for learners in the primary grades, and the importance of context when assessing word recognition. Caldwell and Leslie also provide some guidance in helping you make decisions about the assessments that you will administer (see Week 2 of your syllabus).
Also, it's important to think about the student's background, the culture of the child, his or her home environment, the patterns of reading behavior or non-behavior to which s/he has been exposed, etc.
Comment: Search online for videos, websites, or news articles that highlight the importance of the child's background, culture, language, etc. in the reading assessment process. Then, as you engage in selecting the assessments using SEDL, what did you notice? What did you need to know about the student to select an assessment? What might you have overlooked if you simply used an assessment provided to you by your district? As you read/viewed your course texts, reviewed selected authors' works in this update, or sourced additional materials on our topic, what key factors seemed to be most important in administering reading assessments to students? Were there particular factors that seemed more important for different components of reading (i.e., motivation, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, etc.) ? If so, what were these factors and how did they influence certain components of reading as opposed to others?
The process of sifting through a myriad of reading assessment results can be very daunting. You have heard of and probably use Response to Intervention, also known as RtI, as a means of targeting the wide range of differences in reading performance in schools. RtI has become a very widely implemented system across schools in the United States. But many teachers continue to struggle with the ways in which to bridge the gap from having assessment results to determining the areas of instructional reading need for various students. What is the process through which the teacher makes the decision about assessments to determine the kind of intervention that s/he will provide? Jim Rubin's discussion of the process can be helpful.
After teachers make sense of assessments, they also need to determine how they will provide intervention, that is, the intervention structure they will use. Fisher, Bates and Gurvitz (see chapter 2) discuss the factors that help teachers decide how to craft intervention structures for students and Caldwell and Leslie (see chapters 3&13) describe some of these intervention structures. The authors all explain how interventions can be modified for specific grade levels and what these intervention structures might look like.
While it may be easy to follow one of these examples and decide on the intervention structure you will use for your students, many pressing concerns with intervention persist. Search for articles on usnews.com, edweek.org, etc. that relate to reading intervention in our 21st century. What are some of these concerns?
Are any of your concerns echoed by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell? How do they recommend addressing the challenges?
Mimi Miller and Nancy Veatch have identified some recommendations for choosing and using instructional strategies in ways that help address concerns with intervention. They also provide a neat portrait of what this might look like in action that can be helpful to you as you decide on the instruction you will provide to your case study students.
Comment: In what ways has RtI transformed the role of the teacher as an interventionist? What decisions does the teacher no longer have to make because of RtI implementation in schools? What decisions about intervention continue to be made by the teacher? How does RtI allow teachers to exercise autonomy in the selection and administration of assessments? For teachers who do not work within the RtI framework, how might developing interventions for students be easier? More difficult?
After the process of intervention development and/or selection is complete, the teacher is then responsible for instruction. Motivation has been identified as one of the central underlying factors for reading success during reading instruction. Professor John Guthrie from the University of Maryland points out just how critical this is for elementary students.
And the National Institute for Literacy has identified a number of key factors that teachers of adolescent learners need to attend to in their reading instruction.
But as the teacher implements the instruction within the intervention, assessment does not end. Rather, the teacher continues to monitor students' progress formatively as instruction occurs. Professor Victoria Risko, a renowned scholar and member of the International Reading Association's Reading Hall of Fame, has worked with colleagues to demonstrate just how important it is to continue the process of assessment and the ways in which teachers might accomplish this task.
And Dr. Kouider Mokhtari, along with colleagues, has demonstrated just how this can work in a real classroom within a structured intervention.
Professors Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, in describing the Daily 5 and CAFE help teachers to understand how their intervention structures might fit within the routines of their daily classrooms.
In instructing students, especially at the lower grades, word recognition, word study, phonics, and phonemic awareness instruction are considered critical (see Fisher, Bates and Gurvitz - chapters 3 and 6). But Susan Szabo explains that older English learners can also benefit from instruction in word recognition.
Timothy Rasinksi, nationally-renowned expert on fluency, points out that word recognition needs to be fostered where student make progress towards fluent reading and are also focused on comprehension, an idea supported by Mary Huerta in working with elementary bilingual learners and reflected in the work of Dana Wright and Jabari Mahiri and discussed by Peter Fisher and colleagues (see chapter 4).
The consensus is that reading teachers must be able to integrate different components of reading instruction, such as word study, comprehension and fluency while attending closely to the interests of learners.
Comment: Timothy Rasinki states as he ends his talk on fluency instruction that the biggest challenge for teachers is "combining the art and science of reading instruction." Based on the information presented in this update, which components of instruction would you consider to be an art? Which ones do you think relate to the science of instruction? In what ways do both the science and the art of instructing students matter?
Educators who know about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), are familiar with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), and have gotten a chance to review the goals of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) will realize that the 21st century has brought with it a growing emphasis on the comprehension of expository text. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which prioritizes students' familiarity with expository text, assesses various types of literacy, including math, science, reading, and lately, financial literacy. For these exams, PISA focus on older students' application of knowledge to real-life situations and less on their content knowledge of the curriculum, performance directly linked to students' ability to work with expository texts in specific disciplines. To see how this works, take a look at the question on the library in this 2009 PISA Reading Literacy sample exam. And in the video below, Michael Davidson talks about just how this works for the financial literacy assessment just recently administered by PISA.
As for Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TIMMS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), two additional international examination measures, the emphasis appears to be more on content and students' comprehension of both narrative and expository text. So you might ask, what do these international assessment measures this have to do with your local school? U.S Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, explains here.
While certain teachers believe the CCSS and the push towards informational text is helpful to students and can prepare them for the real world, others argue that the current assessment climate is not especially helpful in reaching these goals. Maureen McLaughlin identifies some principles that help teachers to foster comprehension in an era of standardized assessment.
And Rachel Karchmer-Klein and Donald Leu remind teachers of how new literacies and technology are an integral part of the new thrust on expository text.
For educators who argue that the current climate does not help economically and linguistically disadvantaged students, Donna Ogle provides some pointers that help teachers to be successful with teaching students literacy in the content areas and Sunday Cummins observes that read-alouds can help with this process for all learners.
But comprehension of expository text places a high demand on learners, especially when Tier III vocabulary becomes the emphasis in specific disciplines and content areas. As Emeritus Professor Isabel Beck, renowned expert on vocabulary instruction, observes, students need to also have adequate exposure to Tier II vocabulary, and must be able to connect these to Tier I words so that they can become adept with vocabulary at the higher Tier III level (see Fisher, Bates and Gurvitz - chapter 5 and your Caldwell and Leslie in Week 5 of your syllabus for more on this).
Comment: What is your thinking about expository comprehension and the new push towards understanding expository text as opposed to narrative text? In narrative text, we see a greater emphasis on prior knowledge and in expository text, it seems like the focus becomes vocabulary. Would you agree with this distinction? How can an overemphasis on expository comprehension affect students? How about the other way round? What are the pros and cons? How would this impact comprehension assessment of disadvantaged learners, immigrant learners and linguistically diverse students?
Half a century ago, the emphasis on answering questions in comprehension seemed to drive most of teachers' pedagogical focus with students. However, the past few decades have caused us to think very deeply about the differences between implicit and explicit understanding as well as comprehension strategies and comprehension strategy instruction.
Nell Duke, Professor at Michigan State University, explains why this is the case.
Search online to determine what other factors may have influenced this push towards reading strategy instruction. How do these factors relate (or not) to our era of accountability, the CCSS focus on expository text and the emphasis on college and career readiness?
Fisher, Bates and Gurvitz (see chapter 7) discuss how strategies work to foster comprehension of both traditional print and multimodal text. Caldwell and Leslie (see Week 6 in syllabus) are more concerned with helping teachers to develop the skill of answering questions in their students.
Comment: As a teacher of reading, what assessment results would cause you to focus on comprehension strategy instruction as opposed to developing the skill of answering questions in students? Would you describe the two emphases as mutually exclusive? If not, how can they facilitate each other? Think a bit further to students who have insufficient prior knowledge to answer questions on standardized measures of assessment. How can strategy instruction enable these students to become better at this process?
It is often easy to administer a battery of reading tests to students at the onset of an instructional process and often, at the "end" of a given instructional period. However, the process of assessing students during instruction can yield significant benefits for teachers who can draw from the observational, written, and other forms of feedback received to modify instruction on an ongoing basis. The International Literacy Association provides a brief history and overview of formative assessment and the ways in which it helps teachers to support literacy instruction. And Fisher, Bates and Gurvitz (chapter 8) also provide some excellent insight.
While teachers generally try to monitor how students are progressing throughout an instructional period, there is often a teacher-centered approach to the process that in many ways excludes the student from taking ownership of and exercising autonomy in the process. This lack of autonomy can often lead the student to engage in literacy tasks based on purposes established by the teacher and may not always allow the child to play a fundamental role in the ways in their progress monitoring towards literacy goals. In emphasizing students' awareness of their needs, Nancy Frey, Professor of Literacy in the School of Teacher Education at San Diego State University, has considered a number of factors that really help teachers streamline the formative assessment process and place the child's input as a central factor in the process.
In this powerful video, Frey looks at how teachers set purpose and how they also help their students set a purpose for monitoring their learning during the instructional process. She also considers specific steps that elementary teachers take in assessing what students do not know both within the literacy block and in the often overlooked requirements for reading in the content areas. Frey demonstrates how the teacher can identify what students do not know, which reading needs can help to scaffold their understanding, and the ways in which they can become aware of these processes as they engage with text.
While many students do show signs of progress during an instructional cycle and in formative assessment, there are others that do not respond excellently. Rollanda O'Connow and Janette Klinger explain in "Poor Responders to RTI" just how this can present a challenge for teachers of reading.
And for bidialectal students whose language needs differ and present specific requirements for assessment, being able to identify the ways in which differentiation needs to occur during assessment can go a long way in helping teachers to be true to students' characteristics.
Comment: What insights on formative assessment from the video challenge your current practice and/or push your thinking further? How does the video help to explain why students may respond poorly to RTI? What factors highlighted in assessing and instructing reading for bidialectal learners need to be infused into Nancy's approach to formative assessment and in what ways might this happen?
Over the past eight weeks in our learning community, we explored the extensive range of resources available for helping us to think about how assessment is linked to instruction. An idea of literacy and the way it has been redefined in the 21st century has been a significant part of this process.
Jack Cassidy and Evan Ortlieb provide a very comprehensive view of the emphases that have dominated the field of literacy in recent years and how these have in many ways shaped the landscape for assessment and instruction in literacy. They provide teachers of reading with an understanding of the broader field of reading and help teachers tounderstand how they come to focus on the areas of reading that they do in schools and whether they are ommitting essential components of reading in their instruction needed for students in the 21st century.
Jennifer Turner and colleagues are very clear that teachers in the 21st century must function as literacy leaders despite their designated roles in schools.
With the Common Core State Standards being integral to the literacy instruction and asssessment process, being successful at integrating instruction and assessment will also require teachers of reading to be adept at drawing on the CCSS to highlight the ways in which their students are making progress and must not forget that ultimately, the goal is to help students become meaning-makers whose fluency supports their comprehension process.
Comment: What insights presented this week challenge you to rethink your process of integrating reading assessment and instruction? How will the new emphases in literacy, specifically those highlighted by Cassidy and Ortlieb, require you to approach this process differently? In your view, and based on the material presented this week, what are the biggest challenges for the assessment-instruction dynamic that you believe will have the most significant impact on your practice?