Assessment and Evaluation

Assessment (Continued)

Assessing What Students Know and Can Do as Listeners

Students progress through a series of loosely defined stages that reflect what they know about listening (their knowledge) and what they can do as listeners (their skills and strategies). The goal of an effective language arts program is to develop competent, independent, and strategic listeners.

Listening Checklists

Many opportunities exist to assess students' listening in meaningful contexts and on an ongoing basis. Listening assessments should not be limited to paper-and-pencil assignments or overly simplistic checklists (Cox, 1999, p. 181). Some samples that focus on the listening objectives are provided in this section:

• Sample Listening Continuum
• Sample Emerging/Early Developing Phase Listening Checklist
• Sample Developing Phase Listening Checklist
• Sample Phonological Awareness Diagnostic Assessment Form.

Informal Listening Inventories

To assess students' listening comprehension levels, passages from graded narrative and information texts can be read to students and followed by aided and unaided recall. Often passages from informal reading inventories are used for this purpose. If a student responds correctly to 70% or more of the comprehension questions associated with these passages, the text is considered to be at the student's instructional levels for both listening and reading. Informal listening inventories are usually used with individuals but they can be given to a group of students if a teacher wishes to assess the appropriateness of a text for the class or to collect baseline data regarding each student.

Story and Informational Text Retelling Records

Asking students to retell stories and informational texts after they are read aloud is a good way of assessing listening and gives teachers an understanding of students' comprehension of stories and story structure (Morrow, 1989; Cox, 1999). Retelling is both a useful instructional strategy and an assessment tool. Students must be taught how to retell before it is assessed. Morrow (1989) recommends the following steps for completing a story retelling record:

1. Select a story or an informational text. Note the setting, character, problem, action, outcome, and resolution in the story or the key ideas, pertinent details, and text structure in an informational text. Read the selection to the student.
2. After the student listens to the story or informational text, have the student retell it. In the unprompted retelling, ask open-ended questions such as, "Can you tell me more?" Next, use more specific questions or comments to prompt the student to retell certain parts of the story or key ideas that he or she did not include in the unprompted retelling.
3. Summarize and score the retelling using a record sheet.

Examples provided in this section include:

• Sample Story Retelling Record for the Early Developing Phase
• Sample Retelling Record for the Developing Phase
• Sample Informational Text Retelling.

Listening Self-assessment

It is important to guide students in developing self-assessment abilities prior to involving students in peer assessment tasks. See page 121 for a sample listening self-assessment form.

Assessing What Students Know and Can Do as Speakers

Some speaking assessment forms involve recording the student's speech and describing behaviours. In such cases, it is important to record the actual language that the student uses. The teacher should note when the student found ways other than speech to fulfill a need or want (e.g., pointing, taking something away from another student, etc.), and briefly describe the behaviour.

Many opportunities exist to assess students' use of language and speaking skills and strategies. Some useful techniques are listed below.

Speaking Checklists and Anecdotal Records

• Sample Speaking Continuum
• Sample Emerging/Early Developing Phase Speaking Checklist
• Sample Developing Phase Speaking Checklist
• Sample Speaking Self-assessment
• Sample Repeat My Sentence Assessment

Other Oral Assessments

Teachers can observe and listen, as well as use audio and video tapes, to assess students' oral speaking and presentation skills and strategies. The following sample forms provided in this section can guide such assessments:

• Sample Oral Language Assessment
• Sample Sharing Time Assessment
• Sample Oral Report and Presentation Assessment
• Sample Class or Small Group Discussion Checklist
• Sample Co-operative Group Learning Rating Scale
• Sample Co-operative Group Learning Self-assessment
• Sample Storytelling Checklist
• Sample Role Play Checklist
• Sample Choral Speaking or Reader's Theatre Checklist
• Sample Puppetry Checklist.

Assessing What Students Know and Can Do as Readers

A major goal of English language arts is to develop thoughtful and strategic independent readers who gain meaning from the printed word. Some useful techniques to assess students' reading abilities are listed below.

Reading Checklists and Anecdotal Records

Students progress through a series of loosely defined phases that reflect what they know about reading (their knowledge) and what they can do as readers (their skills and strategies). Developmental checklists give teachers insight into the stages and accomplishments of students. Sample assessment forms provided in this section include:

• Sample Reading Continuum
• Sample Emerging/Early Developing Phase Reading Checklist and Rating Scale
• Sample Developing Phase Reading Checklist and Rating Scale.

Interview and Interest Inventories

• Sample Reading Interview for Emerging/Early Developing Readers
• Sample Interest Inventory for Developing Readers

Self-assessment

It is important to guide students in developing self-assessment abilities prior to involving students in peer assessment tasks. See page 147 for a sample reading self-assessment form.

Running Records

Many teachers keep "running records" as students read texts. The running record (Clay, 1993) is a tool that is useful for assessing students' reading strategies and levels. It can be used any time students are reading classroom texts. The students or the teacher selects a grade-appropriate book that is to be read. The teacher sits beside the student. As the student reads the text (at least a 100-word sample), the teacher records the oral reading behaviours of the student on a blank sheet of paper, noting miscues. See page 148 for a sample running record.

The teacher can examine the running record to determine the strategies that the students used when reading the text. The running record can be scored and reading levels determined. (Total words read correctly including self-corrections: ___ ÷ 100 = ___ percent.) An easy level is indicated by less than one miscue in every twenty words, an instructional level by less than one error in every ten, and a difficult level by one error in every ten words. One running record also can be compared with previous records to determine progress in reading. Checklists such as the one on page 149 can be used to record a student's errors.

A variation of the running record is to have students read orally to a partner. The teacher moves from pair to pair and listens in on the students' readings.

Reading Inventories

Informal reading inventories are individually administered sets of structured reading assessment tasks that usually include graded word lists, and graded oral and silent reading passages. Students read silently and orally, and retell what they recall and/or respond to a set of comprehension questions. Their reading of the word lists and their oral and silent responses are analyzed to establish independent, instructional, and frustrational levels for reading. Teachers can construct their own informal reading inventory (IRI) or use a published inventory with graded narrative and information texts that have been carefully leveled.

Commercial inventories give specific guidance in the administration and scoring of an IRI:

• Students read the IRI graded words orally in isolation and the teacher notes whether the responses are instantaneous (sight words) or whether the student analyzes the words.
• A comprehension level of 90 percent and word identification in context of 98 percent is usually considered the independent reading level, while at least 70 percent for comprehension and 90-97 percent for word recognition in context is considered the instructional level. If word recognition is less than 90 percent, and comprehension below 70 percent, the passage is at the student's frustration level.
• The passages are presented to the student at least one level below the highest independent level on the graded word lists. As the student reads each passage orally, the teacher records oral reading behaviours and miscues using a coding system, or tape records the reading for later analysis. Miscues noted include:
  • omissions (student omits a word or phrase)
  • substitutions (student substitutes another word for one in the text)
  • insertions (student inserts a word or phrase that does not appear in the text)
  • reversal (student reverses words or phrases in text).
• Repetitions (student repeats a word or phrase in an attempt to clarify passage meaning), self-corrections, hesitations, ignoring punctuation, oral fluency, and reading rate also can be noted. After the passage is read, the student is asked to retell as much as he or she can remember, and then respond to comprehension questions that focus on points missed in the retelling. Additional information may be solicited.

Teachers who are comfortable with the IRI procedures can readily apply the same strategies to daily reading activities. Some teachers, for example, use a simple finger count of ten oral miscues to identify when a reading passage of 100 words is too difficult for a student. Oral reading miscues, particularly the substitutions, in a text that is at a student's instructional level can be used to determine how the reader uses the graphophonic, semantic, and syntactic cueing systems (Goodman & Marek, 1992).

The miscues can be analyzed using the following questions:

• Does the miscue change the meaning of the sentence?
• Is the miscue acceptable within the context of the whole text or within the structure of the sentence?
• Does the reader recognize when miscues are made and attempt to self-correct? Was the miscue self-corrected?
• Is the miscue graphophonically similar to the intended word?
• Is the reader using familiar language when the text uses formal language (e.g., mom for mother; isn't for is not)?
• Is the reader's dialect or pronunciation influencing the miscue?
• Does the reader omit words that are not essential to the meaning? Is the reader omitting unfamiliar words?
• Does the miscue involve sight words, phonics, or syllabication skills?
• What are the implications for instruction?

Teachers also can assess the students' reading using the following questions:

• Is the student reading for meaning most of the time?
• Does the reader display effective self-correction behaviours?
• How is the meaning being constructed? Does the reader use text cues? Picture cues? Self-correction or logical substitutions?
• How is meaning being disrupted? Are there omissions? Is there an over-reliance on one cueing system? Is the reader ignoring punctuation?

Retelling is an important component of an informal reading inventory and can help the teacher assess several aspects of reading comprehension.

Using a text that is complete and long enough to yield about 25 miscues, teachers record the miscues using a checklist such as the samples on pages 150-153:

• Sample Miscue Summary/Analysis
• Sample Reading Inventory Scoring Form
• Sample Oral Reading and Retelling Assessment
• Sample Assessment of Student's Reading Response.

Other Useful Reading Assessments

Think Aloud Assessment

Wade (1990) recommends that teachers ask students to read out loud an 80-200 word nonfiction or story passage on a familiar topic and at the student's instructional level. The title should be removed, the passage divided into segments of one to four sentences each, and the topic sentences moved to the end of each paragraph. The student reads out loud and at the end of each segment explains what information is presented (nonfiction) or what is happening in the story.

The teacher can prompt with questions that encourage the student to hypothesize: "What do you think this is about? What in the text/story makes you think so?" The student continues through each section and then retells the entire text in his or her own words. (Students can reread, if necessary).

The teacher analyzes the data for how well the reader hypothesizes and supports hypotheses, what use the reader makes of prior knowledge, how well the reader deals with unfamiliar words, and how confident the reader is in predicting and confirming. Wade (1990) identifies four types of comprehenders: good comprehenders, non-risktakers, schema imposers, and storytellers.

Sample assessment forms provided in this section include:

• Sample Reading Strategies Monitoring Form
• Sample Think Aloud Summary.

Cloze Response

In a cloze assessment, words or parts of words are blocked out or masked in a sentence or short passage (Taylor, 1953). Students must use context cues both in the text and from their background experience to complete the missing sentence or passage. They must attend to both meaning and word order. With beginning students, only one word in a sentence would be left out. By grade 5, as many as eight to ten deletions could be made in a passage. Before using cloze for assessment, teachers should model the procedure using oral or written passages appropriate to the grade level. Usually the first and last sentences of a passage and all punctuation are left intact and blanks are used in place of missing words.

If the cloze response is used as a diagnostic reading assessment, the difficulty of the passage should be identified and every fifth word deleted. All blanks should be of equal length to avoid including visual clues about the length of omitted words. Students read the entire passage before they fill in the blanks and are encouraged to reread the completed passage. When scoring and interpreting the results, teachers should score as correct only those words that are exactly the same as the deleted words. Students are not penalized for spelling errors if the words are recognizable. A score of 40 per cent or less indicates the reader has reached a frustration level. A higher score indicates the material is appropriate for guided and independent reading experiences. If synonyms or words that preserve the meaning of the sentence are also scored as correct, a score of 70 per cent or lower indicates that the materials are inappropriate for the reader.

Examination of students' responses will also indicate the specific instruction that students might need. For example, if a student replaced nouns with verbs, then syntax was not used effectively to construct meaning. If the deleted nouns were replaced by nouns unrelated to the content of the passage, the reader was not employing contextual or semantic cues, or had minimal knowledge about the topic.

To assess textual cues, signal or transition words can be replaced (e.g., first, next, also, but, before, while). To assess students' knowledge of the topic or their abilities to use semantic cues, teachers may wish to delete content words that carry meaning (e.g., nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs). To assess students' use of syntactic cues, teachers can delete some conjunctions, prepositions, and auxiliary words. To focus on graphophonic cues and context clues, the initial consonants or first three letters (or portion) can be left blank.

Graphophonic Cueing System Assessments

Informal and brief assessments of graphophonic and sight words can also be useful to teachers. They might consider the sample assessments included in this section:

• Sample Letter Recognition and Letter-sound Assessment
• Sample Graphophonic Checklist
• Sample Sight Word Assessment.

Conferences and Reading Records

Teachers talk with and listen to students to monitor progress, model strategies, solve problems, and set goals. During conferences, students can read to the teacher, the teacher can read to the students, or both can talk about their reading and their strategies and responses. The teacher can provide support for the students, model particular skills and strategies needed by the students, and provide the vocabulary students need to reflect on and evaluate their own understanding and progress.

Usually one-on-one reading conferences provide teachers with a number of insights. Students can read to teachers; share oral, written, and visual reading responses; retell a selection; read silently, discuss strategies and problems; and discuss independent reading, personal interests, and attitudes. Teachers can complete running records of oral behaviours, use a checklist or rubric to assess specific reading strategies, and make anecdotal notes on the student's depth of engagement with texts as well as reading attitudes, interests, and needs. A conference held with groups of students usually focuses on assessing the progress of a project, responses to literary selections, or use of reading strategies.

Conferences also provide opportunities for students to reflect on the reading process, their knowledge of reading strategies, and their reading interests. By modeling, teachers can gradually encourage students to determine the need and focus of a conference and to conference with peers using appropriate techniques. Conferences are usually brief and focused. This section includes the following sample forms:

• Sample Reading Conference Record
• Sample Student Reading Records.