Assessment and evaluation should reflect the program goal of promoting the interaction of students with oral, literary, and media texts. Assessment can take many forms. Although formal and standardized tests can be informative if chosen, used, and interpreted judiciously, the teacher's ongoing, informal assessment can be even more useful.
| Informal Assessment | Formal |
The continuous informal assessment of each phase of the reading process (before, during, and after reading) directs instruction and gives teachers insight into students' interests, attitudes, needs, and existing reading strategies. Much of the evaluation in reading is diagnostic in nature. As classroom teachers observe and interact with students, they should be making diagnostic decisions which will translate into classroom practice. A variety of instruments can be used to guide the diagnosis.
Early in a course, teachers can determine the interests, attitudes, and abilities of their students. Simple inventories such as the following can be used to get to know the students and to gain insights in order to guide reading.
Sample Reading Inventory
Rate each item from 1 (least) to 5 (most).
I like to read:
______ Mysteries
Science fiction
______ Fantasy
______ Romance
______ History
______ Current events
______ Sports
______ War stories
______ Adventure
______ Biographies
______ Short stories
______ Plays
______ Novels
______ Poetry
______ Other: ________
Additional insights can be gained through interviews, and open-ended assessments
(e.g., "I like to read ...."; "Reading is ..."; "Library books are ..."; "I like to read when ..."; "Teachers want me to ..."), and students' self-assessments.
Each stage of the reading process provides assessment opportunities. In the pre-reading phase, teachers can use information students provide from such activities as predictions, anticipation guides, and semantic maps to determine students' depth of background and any assistance they may need for reading.
During reading, it is important to monitor students' reading rates and ensure students understand that their reading rate should be determined by:
Skimming (the ability to read swiftly and lightly) is necessary when trying to locate information. Scanning (the ability to read more closely for specific detail) helps students understand main ideas. Studying is also a specific reading skill that requires students to read closely and then reread.
A cloze activity is a useful means of assessing students' reading strategies and abilities to make sense of texts. A cloze procedure involves deleting words from a passage of text and replacing them with blank lines. The student must provide the author's original word (or a suitable synonym) for each space. Such use of a modified cloze technique gives teachers an indication of students' ability to construct meaning. Teachers and students should not be concerned with scores in the range of fifty percent. Students scoring in this range probably can comprehend the material if given teacher guidance before, during, and after reading. However, scores below that range may indicate that the material is too difficult for the students, while scores above that range may indicate more challenging material is needed.
Questioning is an important strategy that teachers can use to monitor and assess students' understanding before, during, and after reading. Questions must be carefully crafted. They should be designed to elicit a variety of responses--implicit (leading away from the text) and explicit (leading back into the text). They should allow students to respond in both the aesthetic (i.e., subjective) and efferent (i.e., objective) stances. They should also correspond to the key features of the text whether it is prose, poetry, or a play. Ultimately, modelling effective questions will lead students to create their own questions and become independent readers.
Discussion is an integral part of assessing students' reading. Speech is the exposed edge of the thinking process (Fillion, 1983). By listening to students talking about text, teachers can understand where students are in their level of response. Teachers can judge on what level of abstraction students are operating. In addition, reading is placed in a social context. Discussion reduces the isolation sometimes felt by students when they are left alone to interact with text.
Conferences afford teachers the opportunity to meet individually with students. The interaction can be diagnostic and can guide students' future reading. Teachers can probe students' thinking processes and clarify questions students might have about their reading. Conferences can be either planned or spontaneous.
Students can maintain a response log, reading log, or reading journal. A response log allows students to maintain a record of their thinking as they read a text and to reflect upon the text they are reading. They could respond to prompts such as the following: "I never thought about ______ before, but ...." or "This book reminds me of ...."
A reading log allows students to keep a record of the books and authors they enjoy. This strategy is useful in establishing students' interests in order to guide further reading.
A reading journal allows students to write about a book, perhaps in preparation for a book talk. Some questions to guide students' journal writing include:
Typically, three kinds of responses can be made:
If responses are to have a particular focus, that focus should be communicated to the students.
A response journal can be assessed according to particular criteria and can also be used to help students grow in their types of response. See the sample assessments on the following links.
The following assessment forms are provided as examples. To be able to view and copy these files the user must have a viewing program such as Acrobat Reader. If you do not have such a program, click on the Acrobat Insignia provided below.
Sample Response Journal Assessment
| Informal Assessment | Formal |
Formal evaluation of reading often takes the form of a test. The key for designing an evaluation activity is that it must be consistent with objectives and instructional practices. It must be appropriate for the concepts and skills being taught and for the methods and processes used in teaching throughout the unit. If personal response is important, it must be reflected in the formal evaluation. If several levels of questions have been used in daily work, they must be used in the final assessment activity. If key directives have been used in instruction, the appropriate vocabulary should appear on the final assessment.
Teachers, as reflective practitioners, should know what, why, and how they are using tests. Teachers should ask themselves questions such as the following:
Formal tests can be appropriate and useful evaluative tools but, as with all classroom practices, there should be a variety of assessment techniques employed. It is important to remember that even the most traditional literature can be taught and evaluated in non-traditional ways. Formal cloze tests, standardized Informal Reading Inventories [IRIs], and other normed tests can also serve a purpose. These instruments can be used by trained personnel to determine students' strengths/weaknesses, and areas that need to be addressed. The overriding consideration is that evaluation should promote students' positive attitudes towards the reading of various texts.
