Learning to Assess, Assessing to Learn

Assessment is still a confusing process for me. I was thrown into teaching two years ago with no prior experience and I forged ahead with passion and zest. When I have time to sit with a child one on one, I discover things that interest them and I see that they struggle. Pinpointing those struggles, however, could truly help my students. 

My first semester as a reading teacher I learned through a professional development course that upper level students who still struggle in reading usually have trouble with basic phonics skills they didn't get when they were younger. So I found a third grade phonics worksheet as a bell work, whited out where it said third grade and gave it to my students. Most of them could not complete the worksheet. I knew then that my students were not skilled at sounding out words. I had given no formal test, had no formal teaching knowledge about assessment, but I had assessed a skill and then used it to inform my instruction because we sounded out words A LOT after that.

Other times during my first year of teaching I read with my students or had them read silently and then asked comprehension questions. We would read Hunger Games and I would stop to ask questions. I stopped and asked if students could predict a word meaning based on context, or if they could sound it out appropriately by linking it to other similarly spelled words. Without even realizing it, I was more or less using an Informal Reading Inventory Process, an assessment of their reading skills through a few minutes of inquiry about their interests and understanding of what they were reading. Looking back, I knew through such informal inquiries that The Hunger Games was a book that my students did not read accurately if they were required to read independently. They got confused, they needed clarification, or they just lost interest and visibly stopped reading. Had I been better educated in assessment, I could have recorded those scores or labeled whether the students were independently proficient, at instructional level or at frustration level and used that knowledge to organize my students for small group lessons. 

I was somewhat devastated. I had imagined I would enter a room of struggling eighth graders and turn their lives into literature rich ones, with the joys of a good book osmosis-ing its way from me to them.

 

Not quite so easy. 

Assessment, I thought, was not as necessary because I didn't need a test to tell me these students were struggling. They were years behind, they were too scared to read aloud, they were badly behaved and they did not care to learn what I had to share. 

Assessment, I thought, was a bit of a waste of time. Instead I shall instill a passion for reading by being a bubbly and enthusiastic reader and reading to them, with them....for them.

Of course, the purposes of assessment are not just to tell me what I already know, that these kids cannot read well, but instead to tell me what they can do well and what particular skills need developing the most. It also would have been a great way to document their developing skills, perhaps to show them that they can and will improve. They were old enough to become self advocates for learning if they could have been shown the way. 

Hunger Games became a read aloud book in my first year reading classroom. I read to them and read to them and read to them. I put passion and engagement first. They did improve. At the end of the year, I told a student in my class that he had passed the reading FCAT and would no longer be in intensive reading.

 He said "Yo, Mizz A, stop messin' wit' me." He did not believe me. I had to repeat it.

 "Truly, you passed Bra'Shon, I'm so proud of you." I repeated

"Foreal, Mizz A?????? Heyooooooooo!!!" 

The joy for him was stifled by the sadness that while my students all improved their scores, most were so low to start with that they still were bound to continue with intensive courses. 

Had I known what to do, or had a reading coach to help, I could have given an IRI, a published assessment with questions and passages that pinpoint reading difficulties in students. I could have identified specific miscues. I could have had an exact reading level determined for each student and used it to find books that matched both their interest and ability. 

From Caldwell, I have outline excellent suggestions to keep in mind when using IRI's

• It is always better to underestimate a student's ability or go with their lowest scored result
• Concentrate on errors and miscues that affect meaning 
• Space the assessment out over several shorter sessions
• Record the session 
• Find a quiet place to assess 
• Assessment may need to be repeated
• To measure growth, use a pre and post assessment. You must know where the starting point to chart progress
• Can be adapted for group use

It was noted in the Caldwell and Leslie article that while the IRI is not the only available method to assess reading struggles, it has historically provided many teachers with a successful means of identifying the reading level of their students as compared to their grade level and therefore needs to be in every good reading teacher's cabinet of skills. I know personally I have used other methods to check fluency and identify phonics miscues, but I can see that the IRI is a more comprehensive approach, focusing on word study, fluency development and general comprehension. 

Hardworking student and creepy reindeer teacher.

The IRI outlines three general reading struggles for students in order to best plan instruction

CHALLENGES IN DECODING

• Student does not have working knowledge of the system of pronunciation in English
• Student struggled with sound/letter correspondences
• Student has trouble with BIG, multi syllable words (though I believe this can come from self doubt more than a lack of skill)

CHALLENGES IN FLUENCY

• Student does not have a repertoire of sight words
• Irregularly pronounced or spelled words a problem for student
• Student reads slowly

CHALLENGES IN COMPREHENSION

• Student does not remember/absorb the information
• Student believes comprehensions should be effortless, or does not fully understand the overall process of making meaning while reading
• Student does not have working knowledge of reading comprehension strategies

Once you have identified a student's reading level (where they can independently comprehend and accurately identify words, again using the lower of the two abilities) you should compare it to the grade level they are in. In other words, determine if your student is at the grade level reading that they should be, or are they behind in their reading skills. For me, each of my students is behind by at least two grade levels. My best students read on a 6th grade level and my lowest performers are in grade 3.  :(

Here, I have to digress from the reading because it again presses on the importance of individualized intervention for severe reading problems. For my older students, that means three years behind, which many of my students are. The realistic difficulty here is that I have a reading class of eighteen rowdy and disconnected kids in a Title-1 charter school with ZERO support staff. When I attempt to work with an individual student, I find that I cannot, because the others stop doing their work without my watchful eye.  Sometimes I get very frustrated by they simple explanations in the reading for how to fix and work with students who have reading problems, when one on one or even group interventions are functionally impossible for me because of the lack of motivation and other behavioral problems I have, as well as huge reading class sizes. It isn't intensive with twenty or more students. Argh.

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STAGES OF WORD LEARNING

• Logographic- words are understood within the context of pictures, like STOP in a big red stop sign
• Alphabetic- students begin letter/sound associations and start to understand the weird squiggles on a page represent sounds
• Automatic Word Recognition- develop strategies for unfamiliar and long words
• students can have a mix of these skills 
• Strategic reading is when they possess the ability to decode and make meaning, including determining what is important and using context to define words

READING LEVELS, WHAT THEY MEAN

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Besides the obvious, that as the reading level increases the number of unfamiliar and large words will increase, the sentences will get longer, and the pictures disappear from the page, it is important to recognize that lower elementary reading material represents topics with which small children are familiar, like pets, families, vacations, etc.

Older children are more often given material with which they are not familiar. In part, this explains the need for KWLs and pre reading connections, but in the context of assessment, we must recognize that an assessment should be given with topics that students are familiar with, so that their good reading strategies can be recognized. 

TO LOOK BACK OR NOT

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Should students who are assessed be permitted to return to the passage? As this is a strategy of a good reader, it seems the answer is yes. Assessments should include some questions which students are not permitted to return to the text and some that they are. 

If a child is not succeeded when they are allowed to return to the text, rereading is a strategic skill they need help in developing.

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STUDENT PORTFOLIOS

As a new teacher, I recognized the importance of portfolios for a student's reflection, but I'm a scatter brained mess and had a hard time putting together the most important information or staying organized enough to keep portfolios in use. I had them, but they did not really constitute the right work of a student to show progress. It was not work chosen with purpose and it did not include much reflection either by me or the student, as to progress. It was just a file or student work, not a carefully planned diagnostic tool. 

I thought of all portfolios as ownership portfolios. I believed that students should self select work to add to their portfolios, both because this took the pressure off me to file and put the ownership of the file in their hands, and because self reflection is an important skill for my students to work on. 

Through the reading I recognize that portfolios can suit different purposes. A feedback portfolio might include graded work with explanations of skills and grades, contributions made more readily by the teacher, not just a self-assessed portfolio. 

Then, of course, an accountability portfolio is a great way to keep evidence of a child's progress or my success as a teacher. Recently a teacher was accused by a parent at my school of not providing enough gifted accommodations for her child.  The principal asked the child's teachers to show evidence of such accommodations, which included the child's individual work that met the standards for gifted level learning, including a lot of critical thinking tasks. The teacher did not keep portfolios on the child and had little evidence to provide, so even if she had done everything she needed to do for that child, she had no proof. Yikes.

Through this example I witness and what was discussed in the article, I can see the purpose for both a portfolio for classroom use and one that holds accountability for meeting the demands of particular programs or rubrics and I see that they can conflicting. Two portfolios, however, is not possible in my classroom with the reality of my daily tasks. I prefer to go the route of student involvement and keep detailed anecdotal records of my general classroom success. 

Portfolios are the first thing I start with in class, doing what the article suggests, I have and will use them as a tool to make students' recognize their own learning and become meta-cognitive about their growth through a year in my classroom. 

PROS OF PORTFOLIOS

• STUDENT INVOLVEMENT
• MAKE STUDENTS' AWARE OF THEIR OWN LEARNING
• EASY TO SHARE WITH PARENTS AND ADMIN
• OPPORTUNITY TO REFLECT ON THE YEAR

DRAWBACKS

• TIME CONSUMING
• MORE PREVALENT IN LOWER GRADES/ENGLISH CLASSES, OTHER SUBJECTS LESS INTERESTED IN USING
• ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT NOT PROVEN TO BE HELPFUL IN CREATING EQUITABLE CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION
• SUBJECTIVE (WHERE IS THE ACCOUNTABILITY?)

I believe that any opportunity to involve students in something that makes them aware of their progress has enormous benefits that are more significant than potential drawbacks, though I am concerned with remaining objective and I can see how that could be difficult with a portfolio. 

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IN SUMMATION,

I lean towards informal or alternative assessments for my students because they themselves represent a fringe population in education, at-risk youth who are already turned off by the typical system of instruction and are at odds with the school culture in general. Yet, I've come to see that recognizing the specific difficulties my students face through an IRI which is published and not just an IRI process will be incredibly beneficial to the reading growth of my students and I look forward to possessing both the knowledge and the confidence about reading assessments to grow into a more effective educator. 

Students and Bookshelves.
Think, kids. Also, my aerobic step I use to see kids in the back of the room.

8th grade graduation, so cute.