Comprehensive Guide to Reading and Writing Assessment Techniques

1. Assessment By: Amy Reichenbach and Erica Kohr

2. What is Assessment? • Involves collecting information about or evidence of your students’ learning • continually summarize and reflect • Is continual • Inform teaching • Integral to the curriculum • Is developmentally and culturally appropriate • Recognizes self-evaluation • Invites active collaboration

3. Purposes:

4. Reading Assessment

5. Reading Words • Reading a list of individual words • This helps with word solving strategies and knowing that students can recognize and pronounce words in isolation • Create your own informal assessments- many ways of doing this

6. Informal Reading Inventories • Running Records • Helps measure accuracy rate, reading rate, and fluency. • While the students read, record their errors • This helps teachers identify areas of improvement and teaching areas

7. Miscue Analysis • Measures reading behavior and text processing • Interview, orally read, retell the story, and listen to the recording- record mistakes.

8. Evidence of Learning • Fluent processing- students read with accuracy, ease and fluency. • Comprehension- Response Journals, Retellings • Amount of reading that students do- Reading list • Reading level- Record of book reading process • Attitudes and interests- observation • Response to literature- conferences, writing responses.

9. Writing Assessment

10. Key Factors • Conventions of grammar, capitalization, punctuation and spelling • Spelling • Organization and development of ideas • The writer’s craft—voice, word choice, use of language • The student’s interests and attitudes toward writing

11. Rubrics for assessing Writing: • Content- which includes the organization of the text and aspects of the writer’s craft • Convention- which include spelling, sentence structure, capitalization, punctuation, • 3, 4, 5-point scale • Create your own, use a published rubrics, modify rubrics • Collaborate with colleagues • Internalize the characteristics of writing in each category so you not only use the rubric for assessment but teach toward it everyday

12. Writing Assessments • Spelling Tests: provide a measure of a student’s conventional spelling and are ever-present in elementary schools • Frequently Used Words: 500 frequently used words that students should know by the end of the grade year • Developmental Spelling Analysis: help teachers identify children’s strengths and needs as spellers and to make hypotheses about their levels of development • Writing Records: • Writer’s Notebook: look at samples from writer’s notebooks to determine how your students are thinking • Writing Projects: assess the quality of the final draft for content and conventions

13. Writing Assessments Cont. • Writing Checklist: create and use writing checklists to guide your assessment of student’s writing • Amount and Type of Writing: analyze the projects on this form to determine the amount and kind of writing each student has undertaken • Student Reflection and Attitudes Toward Writing: note what they have learned from each piece they’ve written

14. References