A is for Assessment

Sometimes it seems like all educators are talking about is assessment. Whether it is the state mandated standardized tests or quarterly fluency tests assigned by a particular school, fluency, words read per minute, self-correction, and many other concepts seem to be constantly tested. What is the purpose for all this testing? I think the true purpose is often forgotten. Assessment is for teachers. By assessing their students, teachers are able to gain a better grasp on how they can help their students. Assessment should not be about grading, competition, or leveling students. It should be about recognizing students’ strengths, building upon those strengths, and helping students gain strategies for meaning making and engaging writing. With the current standardized testing and leveling crazes, as teachers, we must ensure that we do not lose sight of the purpose of assessment.

Pat Johnson and Katie Keier take time to discuss assessing students in Catching Readers Before They Fall. Although some take assessment to unnecessary and even harmful extremes, assessment does have an important place in the classroom. Without assessment, teachers would have no way of knowing how to help their students grow in their reading and writing skills. I am using assessment as a broad definition. Having conversations about texts, having students write and draw and act out a text, reading and analyzing students’ free writing, and listening to students read aloud are all forms of assessment. These activities are not always graded strictly, but they do inform teachers of many aspects of students’ learning. Comprehension, reading fluency, recall, writing voice, spelling, and grammar can all be evaluated from these activities without forcing students to sit for hours in a silent room, unable to receive answers to their questions, or try to prove that they are learning and growing.

When teachers assess their students, there is a great deal of information that they receive in a short period of time. To make recording and compiling this information easier so teachers can review and decide the next discussion to have with their students, many assessment forms have been developed. Johnson and Keier provide several excellent forms for teachers to use for easy organization in recording commentary on their students. Some examples are provided below.

Reading conference list

Sample reading conference list

Sample reading assessment grid

Reading assessment grid

These forms can help teachers see what group mini-lessons may be good topics for group discussion or individual conferences. As teachers, one of our goals should be to help students become excited about learning. One way to destroy this excitement in our students is to level them in a way that degrades the students and targets them at “low” or “high” levels. All students have room for improvement, and charting students’ expertise and areas for improvement can help show areas in which students have had various levels of exposure. Students come from so many backgrounds, so it seems completely reasonable that they would have had different degrees of interaction with literacy and other subjects. Charting transforms this information into a visual representation for teachers and should not be used to say that one child is smarter or more advanced than another. Assessment is critical for teachers to understand what level of understanding their students are at and should be used in a way to help teachers help their students instead of targeting students as “at risk.”