Discuss how teachers use diagnostic tests to determine students’ reading levels and diagnose their strengths and needs.

Write an essay of 4-5 pages discussing one topic. See the outline for the topic below. Choose one Compendium of Instructional Procedure (in our class textbook) and explain how this instructional method can assist students with the topic you chose. Feel free to use additional resources (Ex. articles you have read or presented in class and classroom experiences) Also incorporate your philosophy and voice into the writing.
Assessing Students’ Literacy Development
Explain how teachers link instruction and assessment.
Discuss how teachers use diagnostic tests to determine students’ reading levels and diagnose their strengths and needs.
Identify instructional methods that promote early literacy development in reading and writing based on assessment data.
Chapter 3
AFTER STUDYING THIS CHAPTER, YOU’LL BE PREPARED TO:
3.1 Explain how teachers link instruction and assessment.
3.2 Discuss how teachers use diagnostic tests to determine students’ reading levels and diagnose their strengths and needs.
3.3 Define high-stakes testing and discuss its role in literacy instruction and assessment.
3.4 Describe how teachers use portfolios to assess students’ learning and their progress toward meeting grade-level standards.
Mrs. McNeal’s Second-Quarter Assessments
The end of the second quarter is approaching, and Mrs. McNeal is assessing her first-graders. She collects assessment data about her students’ reading, writing, and spelling development. Then she uses those data to document ­students’ achievement, verify that they’re meeting state standards, determine report card grades, and make instructional plans for the third quarter.
Today, Mrs. McNeal assesses Ethan, who is six and a half years old. The teacher has a collection of Ethan’s writing, but she wants to assess his reading level. At the beginning of the school year, Mrs. McNeal ­considered him an average student, but in the past month, his reading has accelerated. The paragraph that is supposed to be in this ‘feature’ is as follows:
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to determine students’ reading levels and assess their literacy learning. Teachers integrate assessment with instruction through a four-step cycle of classroom assessment: planning, monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting. As you read this vignette, notice how Mrs. McNeal evaluates her first-graders’ learning at the end of the second quarter. She uses multiple assessment tools to measure their achievement, determine grades, and set goals for the next quarter.
Assessing Ethan’s Instructional Reading Level
Mrs. McNeal regularly takes running records as she listens to students reread familiar books to monitor their ability to recognize high-frequency words, decode unfamiliar words, and use reading strategies. In addition, she assesses each student’s instructional reading level using the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA)—an assessment kit with 44 leveled books arranged from kindergarten to fifth-grade reading levels.
At the beginning of the school year, most of Mrs. McNeal’s first-graders were reading at level 3; by midyear, they should be reading at level 12; and by the end of the school year, they’re expected to reach level 20. Ethan was reading at level 3 in August, like many of his classmates, and at the end of the first quarter, he was reading at level 8. Now, nearing the end of the second quarter, Mrs. McNeal decides to test him at level 16 because he’s reading a book at that level in his guided reading group.
Ethan reads The Pot of Gold (2001), a level 16 book in the DRA kit. The book recounts an Irish folktale about a man named Grumble who makes an elf show him where his pot of gold is hidden. Grumble marks the spot by tying a scarf around a nearby tree branch and then goes to get a shovel to dig up the gold. Grumble admonishes the elf not to move the scarf, and he doesn’t; instead, the elf ties scarves on nearby trees so that Grumble can’t find the gold. Mrs. McNeal takes a running record while Ethan reads; a running record will give her an opportunity to assess what Ethan can do independently. Review Ethan’s Running Record before reading on.
As indicated on the running record, Ethan makes 12 errors and 2 self-corrects; his accuracy rate is high at 95%. Mrs. McNeal analyzes Ethan’s running record by asking herself three questions:
Did Ethan have any difficulty with high-frequency words?
What sources of information does Ethan typically use and neglect?
What reading strategies does Ethan use or not use when he encounters difficulty?
Mrs. McNeal thought that Ethan knew my and that by sight, so she is surprised that his self-corrections were on words that he should have recognized automatically.
She is pleased to note that nine of Ethan’s substitutions fit all three sources of information: Grumply for Grumble, did not for didn’t, I for I’ll, make for mark, or for of, me for my, self for scarf, they for that, maybe for may. All those substitutions make sense, sound acceptable, and look like the actual word in the text. On three occasions, however, Ethan used only visual information—safr and scafer for scarf, and sit for still—and neglected meaning and structure.
Mrs. McNeal examines the record for evidence of Ethan’s strategy use. She notes with some concern that Ethan showed very few signs of monitoring his errors. In fact, he seemed to notice on only three occasions that he had encountered difficulty: once when he asked for help with the word always and twice when he corrected his errors—me for my, and they for that. Mrs. McNeal knows that, unless Ethan notices when he has made an error, he won’t have an opportunity to problem solve.
Next, Mrs. McNeal thinks about Ethan’s comprehension. When Ethan retells the story, he shows that he comprehends the big idea, but his retelling isn’t especially strong. He retells the beginning and the end of the story but leaves out important details in the middle.
A Running Record Scoring Sheet
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Mrs. McNeal pulls together all of the information she has collected and evaluates Ethan’s progress. She decides that he is within grade-level expectations for that time of the year and that he has made consistently good progress since the start of the school year.
The teacher makes notes about Ethan’s instructional priorities for the third ­quarter of the school year so that he will continue to make progress. One priority will be that he notices when he makes an error and then makes an attempt to solve by cross-checking. In guided reading lessons, she’ll focus on teaching Ethan to monitor (or notice) his errors. If he makes an error and doesn’t noticit, she will say, “Something you just read wasn’t quite right. Go back to find and fix it.”
Second, so that Ethan will have something to try once he notices he has made an error, she will teach him ways to problem solve words while reading. To teach him to cross-check information, she will prompt him to use information that he is neglecting. For example, if he uses only visual information, she will say, “You are using the letters to try the word. That’s good, but it doesn’t make sense. Try something else that will make sense and look right.” Mrs. McNeal knows that Ethan often uses all sources of information, which is great, but she needs to teach him to use additional visual information at those times. For errors such as maybe for may, or self for scarf, she will say, “Take a closer look at that word; it doesn’t look quite right.” Or, she might say, “Look at all the letters in that word and try again.”
Finally, because Ethan had difficulty with some high-frequency words (of, my, that, may, I’ll) that he should know by sight, Mrs. McNeal will add some sight word activities. ­High-frequency words need to be read with automaticity to free up cognitive resources to use for ­comprehension.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to determine students’ reading levels and assess their literacy learning. Teachers integrate assessment with instruction through a four-step cycle of classroom assessment: planning, monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting. As you read this vignette, notice how Mrs. McNeal evaluates her first-graders’ learning at the end of the second quarter. She uses multiple assessment tools to measure their achievement, determine grades, and set goals for the next quarter.
Assessing Ethan’s Knowledge of High-Frequency Words
Mrs. McNeal’s goal is for her first-graders to recognize at least 75 of the 100 high-frequency words by the end of the school year. In August, most students could read at least 12 words; Ethan read 16 correctly. Today, Mrs. McNeal asks Ethan to read the list of 100 high-frequency words again. She expects that he’ll be able to read 50 to 60 of the words, and when he misses 5 in a row, she’ll stop; but Ethan surprises her and reads 65!
Assessing Ethan’s Ability to Write Words
Several days ago, Mrs. McNeal administered the “Words I Know” test to the class: She asked the students to write as many words as they could in 10 minutes without copying from classroom charts. In August, most students could write and spell 15 to 20 words correctly; Mrs. McNeal’s goal is for them to write and spell 50 words by the end of the school year. Ethan wrote 22 words in August, and on the recent test, he wrote 50 correctly spelled words, including the, hat, bat, come, go, going, dog, dogs, God, cat, cowboys, from, fight, night, sun, run, fish, starfish, fin, trees, what, and you. Mrs. McNeal reviews Ethan’s list and notices that most are one-syllable words with short vowels, such as cat and fin, but he’s beginning to write words with more complex spellings, such as what, come, and night; words with inflectional endings, such as going; and two-syllable words, such as cowboys. She concludes that Ethan is making very good progress, in both the number of words he can write and the complexity of the spelling patterns he’s using.
Assessing Ethan’s Compositions
Mrs. McNeal looks through Ethan’s journal and chooses several representative samples written in the past three weeks to score; one of the samples is shown in this chapter. Here’s the text with conventional spelling and punctuation:
I ate pizza for dinner. My dad took me to Round Table. It was half Hawaiian and half pepperoni. We brought the leftovers home.
Using the school district’s six-point rubric, Mrs. McNeal scores the composition as a 4. A score of 5 is considered to be at grade level at the end of the school year, and Mrs. McNeal ­believes that Ethan will reach that level before then. She notices that he’s writing several ­sentences, even though he sometimes omits a word or two, and he often leaves out the punctuation at the ends of sentences. Mrs. McNeal plans to talk to him about rereading his writing to catch omissions, add punctuation marks, and correct misspelled words.
Ethan’s Journal
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Assessing Ethan’s Word Knowledge
The first-graders take a dictation test each week. On Monday, they compose two sentences and write them on a chart displayed in the classroom. They practice writing the sentences on small whiteboards each day, and during minilessons, Mrs. McNeal draws their attention to high-frequency words, the phonetic features of words, and capitalization and punctuation rules applied in the sentences. Last week’s sentences focused on The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System (Cole, 1993), a book Mrs. McNeal read aloud:
Their bus turned into a rocket ship. They wanted to visit all of the planets.
After practicing the sentences all week, Mrs. McNeal dictates them for the students to write on Friday. She tells them to try to spell the words correctly and to write all of the sounds they hear in the words that they don’t know how to spell. Ethan wrote:
The bus turd into a rocket ship they wande to vist all of the planis.
Ethan spelled 10 of the 15 words correctly and included 46 of 51 sounds in his writing. He omitted the period at the end of the first sentence, however, and didn’t capitalize the first word in the second sentence.
Mrs. McNeal uses this test to check students’ phonics knowledge and ability to spell high-frequency words. Ethan spelled most of the high-frequency words correctly, except that he wrote the for their. His other errors involved the second syllable of the word or an inflectional ending. Mrs. McNeal concludes that Ethan is making good progress in learning to spell high-frequency words and that he’s ready to learn more about two-syllable words and inflectional endings.
Evaluating Ethan’s Literacy Achievement
Having collected and analyzed the assessment data, Mrs. McNeal evaluates Ethan’s progress. He and his classmates receive separate number grades on their report cards in reading, writing, and spelling—ranging from 1, not meeting grade-level standards, to 4, exceeding standards. Ethan receives a 3 in reading, writing, and spelling; a score of 3 means that he’s meeting grade-level standards. Even though Ethan’s reading level is higher than average, his lack of noticing errors and problem solving keep him at level 3 in reading.
Standards Check
Mrs. McNeal addressed the Common Core State Standards Initiative (2010) as she assessed Ethan’s reading and writing achievement in the vignette you’ve just read. Review the first-grade literacy standards document online at www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy and identify the standards that Mrs. McNeal addressed through her assessment activities. Create your list and compare it with Mrs. McNeal’s instruction.
Assessment has become a priority in 21st-century schools. School district, state, and federal education agencies have increased their demands for accountability, and today most students take annual high-stakes tests to measure their achievement. By linking assessment and instruction, teachers improve students’ learning and their teaching.
The terms assessment and evaluation are often considered interchangeable, but they’re not. Assessment refers to the collection and interpretation of data to inform decision making. Evaluation refers to the decision making itself about how well the student has progressed.
Assessments can be formative or summative; it depends on the purpose behind collecting the information. According to the 2017 Position Statement of the International Literacy Association (ILA, 2017), summative assessments are designed to measure achievement at the end of an instructional sequence. Examples of summative assessments can range from the more formal state tests to the more informal teacher-designed quiz at the end of a unit of instruction. A running record can be a summative assessment if it is given at the end of an instructional period to determine the students’ final instructional level.
Check the Compendium of Instructional Procedures, which follows Chapter 12. These green terms also show a brief description of each procedure.
The 2017 Position Statement of the International Literacy Association defines formative assessments as ongoing and taking place during instruction. Formative assessments are used to screen and monitor student progress and to inform instruction. Again, a running record can be an example of a formative assessment if it is given to inform teaching and monitor student progress during the instructional period.
Because the purpose of Mrs. McNeal’s assessments (the running record, spelling assessment, knowledge of high-frequency words, writing assessment) was to measure student progress at the end of the second quarter, we can refer to them as summative assessments. The same assessments would be considered formative if they were given during the term to help make decisions about what to teach next.
A high-stakes assessment is any assessment that is used to make an important high-stakes decision, like retaining a student in a grade or raising state standards for achievement. By definition, any assessment can be a high-stakes assessment if its results are used to make a high-stakes decision, but in reality, high-stakes assessments are typically formal, summative assessments like a state achievement test. (More information on high-stakes assessments appears later in this chapter.)
It is important to note that we need a variety of assessments in schools because there are so many stakeholders with different concerns and interests in the progress of students, including parents, other educators, the community, the school district, policymakers, and of course, the students themselves. The goal of all assessments, though, ought to be to produce information that is useful in helping students become better readers (Afflerbach, 2016, p. 414).
In contrast, evaluation is the decision making or judgment that is made after analyzing assessment data. In other words, assessments are given to facilitate evaluation.