“We are teaching kids
to be literate so they can have success in college and future careers. We are
teaching kids to be literate so they can feel good about themselves so that
they can love reading, so they can identify as readers and writers, so they can
understand themselves better, so they can understand other people better. That
is the big purpose here. The purpose is not to teach kids how to pass
tests. We are doing something more
important than just teaching kids how to pass a test.”
The above quote was mentioned in the video Leading a Balanced Literacy Assessment
and I think as Reading Specialists, it is important to that to make sure
students are learning what we are teaching them. In order to know that students
are learning what we are teaching them, we need to know that assessments should
not be given for students to just pass a test. They should be given to students
to test how they will react to the outside world and how they would test their
experiences in the outside world. Assessments should not be given to students
to just pass a test to test their knowledge of something they read in a
textbook. Tests are to be given to students based on their own experiences from
the texts they read. This is why teachers should allow students to choose their
own books to read once in a while because when students are interested in
something they like, they can connect it to their own experiences and when it
is time to be tested on it they do well because they have connections with it.
There are several different ways to implement
effective and meaningful assessments in an effort to improve student
achievement other than just assigning a test. Teachers can assess their
students to improve student achievement through teacher observation and questioning,
performance assessments, and diagnostic assessments. Students are assessed
through their experiences from learning and being in the classroom learning environment.
“Without assessments that are sensitive to the contributions of each component
to overall reading ability, teachers will not be able to target their
instruction to the skills and strategies most in need of improvement” (page
27). Teachers need assessments to find out where their students are excelling
at and where they are struggling. In order for that to happen, teachers need to
use the right assessments and the ones mentioned in the articles are on the
path to the right direction, but I think and research also indicates that they
are still things we do not know and other assessments that can be used, but we
may not know about them yet.
- 1 How much time is spent on literacy assessment?
- 2. What redundancies are included in your system?
- 3. How much variety is included in your assessment system?
- 4. What data is used for curriculum decisions?
- 5. What data is used for individual student decisions?
- 6. How are assessment results communicated with students and families?
References
Leading a balanced literacy assessment
system: Conducting a literacy assessment review. (2015). Retrieved
April 15, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v-uruFu6f-kg0
National Institute for Literacy. (2007). What Content-Area Teachers Should Know About Adolescent Literacy.
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