Organization: Part 5: Assesment Strategies
Assessment is a huge component of teaching reading.
If you haven’t assessed your students, how will you know how
they are developing in all of the different aspects of literacy? Do
you know what sounds they know and don’t know? Do you know whether
they can manipulate phonemes and are comfortable with phonemic awareness
in all of its forms? Do you know whether they understand what they
read? Do your students read fluently, with proper phrasing and prosody?
Do you know how many words per minute they can read? All of these
assessment possibilities were discussed under the assessment tabs
of the other modules. Please refer back to each module as you need
to. Just don’t assume that, because you taught something, your
students all learned it. That is one of the biggest mistakes a teacher
can make. In addition, remember that short assessments conducted frequently
will provide more guidance for your everyday teaching than massive
standardized tests at the end of the year. Finally, remember to use
the OH k-12 Language Arts Standards to guide your instruction. Make
sure you have taught and assessed each of the indicators for your
grade level. If your assessments tell you that your students have
met the standards, standardized tests will take care of themselves.
Assessing Children to Determine Their Reading Level
There are many tools to assess children’s reading levels.
Informal reading inventories (IRIs) are tools that contain graded
word lists and graded passages. You start by asking a child to read
the word lists. There are a predetermined number of errors that
indicate that the word list is at independent, instructional or
frustration level for the child. When you get to the frustration
level, stop. Then do the same with the graded passages. There are
comprehension questions for these. Some informal reading inventories
also have you do a miscue analysis on the errors to determine skills
that may need to be taught. For example, studying the miscues may
show you that a child is not reading through to the end of a word.
My favorite informal inventory is Johns’ Basic Reading Inventory,
but there are many others, including the QRI-II, Cooter and Flynte,
Woods and Moe, and Ekwall and Shankar. Also, readingtutors.com is
an online tutoring resource that includes assessments of reading
level. It is part of the tools offered by Reading A-Z.com.
Fry Readability
Another option to determine reading levels is Fry Readability. This
requires a chart (see FryReadabilityGraph.gif).
First, randomly select three 100-word samples from a text. Count
the number of sentences and syllables in each sample. If there is
a sentence fragment in the 100 words, count what portion of the
sentence is included. For example, if only three words of a ten-word
sentence are included in a 100-word passage that had 6 complete
sentences in it, the passage would have 6.3 sentences. Average the
number of sentences and syllables over the three samples. Then plot
the number of sentences on the horizontal axis of the chart and
the number of syllables on the vertical axis. The chart has lines
indicating the ranges of the grade levels.
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