Literacy Assessment: Assessment Summary Chart Essay

Assessment Summary Chart

Appropriateness of assessment tools for reporting progress, diagnosing reading skills, or providing outcome data

Informal reading inventories (IRI) and running records are effective to monitor the students’ progress in reading, paying attention to the specifics of word-recognition (Gunning, 2010, p. 77). IRI and running records help determine the changes in reading with references to the number and character of miscues made by students.

That is why, the results of IRI and running records are important to focus on the students’ progress while reading. These assessment tools can be also used by the teacher to diagnose the level of the skills’ development to implement strategies which can help students overcome difficulties in reading and achieve higher results.

Retelling is effective when it helps determine the students’ progress in comprehension and in grasping the main idea of the text. The progress is marked with references to the number and character of details which are reproduced by students while retelling. Retelling is also effective to diagnose the development of the students’ skills, orienting to their further improvement basing on the diagnostic results.

The level of the students’ understanding phonics and of the phonemic awareness is constantly changing that is why phonics tests and phonemic awareness assessments are necessary to monitor the general students’ progress and for the additional diagnosis of the individual students’ abilities to distinguish sounds or work with phonemes to receive the ability to develop and improve definite skills.

Observations are used as progress monitoring tools to watch the changes in the students’ development of literacy skills, and they provide the general picture of the students’ skills, interests, typical miscues, behaviors, techniques, strengths, and weaknesses. Reading logs are effective tools for the students’ self-evaluation.

The regular character of completing the assessment provides the teacher with opportunities to monitor the students’ progress in reading more difficult books, changes in reading interests and reactions, and involvement with reading. Portfolio is the specific assessment tool which can be used both for monitoring the progress and assessing the outcomes, depending on the type of the portfolio.

For instance, the process portfolios are effective to monitor the progress with references to the levels of the materials used and competency in completing the portfolio which can change during the definite period. The evaluation portfolios are necessary to assess the students’ results with references to the definite standardized samples used, and these portfolios are used as outcome assessment tools.

Fluency assessment is important to monitor the students’ progress in pace of reading or reading more letters and words (indicators of proficiency). Thus, it is used as the progress assessment tool. Fluency assessment is also standardized and based on benchmarks, and it uses fixed criteria to assess outcomes. From this perspective, it is a general outcome assessment (Gunning, 2010, p. 77).

Rubrics also belong to the outcome category because they focus on “what is expected from students in order for them to meet a certain level of performance” (Gunning, 2010, p. 86). Rubrics are necessary to assess the students’ results and compare them with definite standards adopted within certain institutions or states. Thus, rubrics provide evaluative criteria and information about students’ outcomes.

The effectiveness of usage in groups or individually

IRI, running records, phonics tests, and phonemic awareness assessment can be used to assess only individuals because the teacher should focus on reading or sound recognition presenting by one student at a time to take notes, to fix possible miscues, to concentrate on the individual skills which need to be developed or improved.

Fluency assessment is also effective when it is realized individually to pay attention to the students’ definite competencies to make conclusions about the level of performance. Rubrics can be used in a group of students to assess and compare their performance in relation to the definite criteria and standards presented in the rubric.

Retelling as the assessment tool should be used with individual students when retelling is oral, and retelling can be used within the group of students when it is the written assessment. Observations can be both individual and group, depending on the task of the assessment determined by the teacher before starting the observation of an individual or a group of students (Paratore & McCormack, 2007).

The usage of reading logs in a group or with an individual depends on a purpose to receive the information about an individual’s progress and interests or the group’s progress in reading at a time. Portfolios are effective as the tools to assess the individual progress of a student, but they can be also used to assess the work basing on the group when portfolio conferences are conducted.

References

Gunning, T. (2010). Creating literacy instruction for all students. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon/Pearson Education.

Paratore, J. & McCormack, R. (2007). Classroom literacy assessment: Making sense of what students know and do. USA: Guilford Press.