Week 5 Assessing for Comprehension

C& R Chapter 1

There is still much to research in regards to writing and best practices. However, currently there is also much to be learned from prior research. The authors suggested framing writing instruction around the standards.  The student’s learning should not be a mystery to them. They should know how to use certain traits or writing and when to use them. In my experience, the best way for me to do this has been to write kid friendly versions of the state writing rubrics and explain to students what each aspect is. Students have laminated copies that they can write on and check off as they write. We also spend time practicing each area of the 6 plus one writing traits. The authors also explain the importance of teacher modeling and think alouds, so that students can get an inside look into a writers thought process. It is also important to allow students time to practice writing daily whether it is in small groups or individually. It is a hope of the authors that students see how writers use different texts in the world. This made me think of how we need to provide our students with authentic writing opportunities that allow us to teach the different modes and offer them practice with writing to various audiences for a variety of reasons.  One of the research questions mentioned in this chapter had to do with when and how should students use invented spelling. The authors explained that not much research has been done in this area and that there still needs to be more done. I struggle with this as a teacher, because I have seen how spelling can become a roadblock for my weak spellers. They have great ideas, but sometimes get so caught up in spelling the words correctly that it stops the flow of ideas and keeps the paper from being as good as it could without these interruptions. However, sometimes their spelling strongly effects the readability of the text and to me seems to be a big issue. I try to help fix these readability issues by giving them key terms to use in their writing, access to our word wall, and their own personal dictionaries which have common words and their own words they’ve added that they struggle with.

Since there is a lack of research with the question above about invented spelling, the authors said they have relied on teacher experience for answers to that question. What are your suggestions as to when and how students should use invented spellings?

What types of authentic texts do you show your students that offer them a chance to see how writers use different texts in the real world?

What authentic writing purposes to your students engage in to practice the different texts that you might introduce them to?   

The authors also stressed the importance of creating an engaged community of writers? What are some ways you might establish this with students?

DS & G Chapter 8

This chapter discussed the importance of using multiple assessments to gain insight into students listening, viewing, and or reading comprehension. Commercial reading kits provide teachers with reliable benchmarks for readability levels. These texts are used to assess comprehension and fluency and to effectively find a reader-text match, so that students can read texts at their level. After analyzing the data, teachers can determine student’s instructional, independent and frustrational levels. When the teacher is scaffolding students with their comprehension and fluency, the students can use books at their instructional levels. I liked that the author suggested not using the retell portion of the DIBEL’s assessments. I have been required to use the DIBEL’s retell before, and I must say I agree with the author’s thoughts on its weaknesses. When I had to use this to asses my students retelling, we would mark off numbers for each word retold within a minute and then score the retelling with a scale. Like the authors explained, the students only were able to read the text for a minute where their focus is on accuracy and speed rather than comprehension. Then we would be asking them to orally retell in one minute what they speed read in a minute. I do not see how we can use that information to make decisions about a student’s comprehension!  As teachers, this made me think of the importance of making sure what we are doing is actually a best practice for our students despite what the product makers might say. Even though the makers of these assessments state that their assessments have evidence of strong reliability and validity, I think we have to use our experience as teachers as well as spend time researching the assessments ourselves to analyze their effectiveness for our students. 

Some common forms of assessments that can be used to check comprehension are: retellings, recall, reading scales, and running records. I liked that the author mentioned that young children might give more thorough retells to an individual or puppet that wasn’t present when they were reading. For children who can use written expression to retell, this made me think that they could write a retelling in the form of a letter to an absent classmate, friend in another class or their parents.  I found it interesting and never considered all of the information you can learn about a child’s comprehension even before they are able to read. After reading this chapter, I will also try to include some of the recall questions into my own guided reading groups. I can see how retelling a story or a video is not enough, and the importance of recalling making sure you are requiring students to tap into and use those higher level thinking skills that they may not use without you prompting them to do so.  The end of the chapter discussed standardized and standards based testing, and how we shouldn’t use these tests to inform our instruction or guide student learning. What frustrates me with this idea is why are we still using these tests to make decisions about whether or not are students can read. To me it makes more sense to make these evaluations with commercial kits like DRA that show growth over time, that give us more accurate information to go off of rather than the once a year test. Especially when these scores, can also be affected by so many other outside factors.

After reading this chapter, what do you believe is the best way for us to assess student’s reading comprehension when their scores are being used to make evaluations like grade placements?

What type of commercial kits have you used to assess reading comprehension and how effective are they at guiding your instruction and truly letting you know what your students know and still need to learn?

How often do you keep running records of your student’s progress? What is the most efficient and effective way to do this using MSV to analyze error patterns as the author suggested? MSV: (Meaning: Does it make sense? Error fits the context of the text. Syntax: Does it sound right? Error uses acceptable English. Visual: Does it look right? Error looks similar to the word in the text.).

H&F Chapter 2

This chapter discussed how teachers can use the TSI to gauge whether students are at the emergent, beginner, or transitional tier for word knowledge. This data can help teachers know what students already know and what needs to be learned. The author went on to discuss how progress monitoring students can help you see or not see growth over time which is also a reflection of how effective a teacher’s instruction is. We can progress monitor word knowledge by assessing how students can demonstrate, maintain, and transfer knowledge. I liked that the author mentioned how students will have words mastered the week of a test, but later forget how to spell them. In an effort to fix this problem, the authors suggest having cumulative spelling tests over previously learned skills about every six weeks. The end goal is for students to be able to transfer their word knowledge to be able to successfully encode and decode words when writing or spelling.  This chapter made me realize the importance of including dictation sentences on spelling tests to monitor transfer of knowledge. The authors mentioned that these sentences should require students to apply knowledge learned of the features being studied. 

What activities do you have your students do to demonstrate their transfer of word knowledge in reading or writing?

S&H Chapter 6

This chapter explained that vocabulary can be very tricky to assess and that those measures should be approached with caution because each has its strengths and weaknesses.  Student’s knowledge of words can be receptive or expressive. Receptive knowledge means students can understand words when they are read or said, whereas expressive knowledge relates to being able to use words in speech or writing.  This topic made me think of how I’ve experienced students saying that they know a word, but have trouble expressing its meaning with speech. Word knowledge measures can use criterion-referenced score interpretations (CR) or norm-referenced score interpretations (NR).  The CR interpretations are made by comparing how the student does in comparison to a certain level of mastery, whereas the NR interpretations are used to compare how students do in comparison with other individuals (norm group) that have taken the assessment. I thought it was important to note that although the criterion-referenced CBM’s are quick assessments used for screening and progress monitoring, they should be used with care. Since these measures also include some of the following skills: fluency, semantics, syntax, and decoding, the teacher needs to make sure that the scores are true reflections of the construct being assessed and not reflective of weaknesses in the skills mentioned above. I also liked that the authors mentioned that teaching without testing whether students have learned what has been taught is like cooking a meal without tasting it. This idea reiterates the importance of assessing vocabulary to determine what children have learned and what areas they are still lacking in. However, the assessments need to inform instruction, and not take up too much teaching time. Each measure mentioned had its pros and cons, and we need to be mindful of these as well as not rely too much on one single measure.

The chapter mentioned several activities that teachers can use to assess receptive and expressive words knowledge. Which activities or combination of activities do you think have the greatest effect size? 

What are some variations of these activities that you’ve used in your own classes to assess vocabulary?

What are some ways that you introduce new vocabulary to children prior to reading to decrease text complexity? In your opinion, what types of assessments are most useful in measuring how well the students learned these new words?

Jones et al Article

This article was very informative and interesting. I wish more teachers could read this!  I liked how the authors were very straightforward with what to focus on for small group interventions and whole group lessons. The author’s focused on three areas that students need interventions in the most: decoding, automaticity, and comprehension. The percentages of students struggling in these areas closely matched the characteristics of my current third grade class. The authors suggested using caution when timing students reading in one minute intervals. In every district that I’ve worked in this has always been something we were asked to do, and share/discuss this data with parents and colleagues. However, the authors of this article suggest using extended passages and texts to improve rate rather than the one minute timings. I liked the idea of explaining to students that their reading rate shouldn’t be too fast or too slow, and should match how we speak. I think the point about making sure that rate is not the central goal of comprehension is also important. The student’s rate and decoding should improve to the point that their cognitive energy can be used for comprehension. When thinking about independent, instructional, and frustration levels in regards to differentiated reading interventions mentioned in this article, I think the author gave some great ideas.  When students are being pulled in small groups to work on decoding, automaticity, or comprehension with the teacher, I think they should be practicing such skills at their instructional level. The authors mentioned using books above student’s current reading levels during classroom read alouds. Even though these books are at a level which might cause frustration if read alone, during read a read aloud time the teacher can assist students with applying  comprehension skills and in doing so also expose to them new vocabulary  and content at a higher reading level.

One part of the text that was a bit confusing for me was the part that talked about strategy instruction for comprehension. The author’s explained that often times teachers over teach the strategies when students only need to be reminded to use them. Furthermore, they explained how a study showed that teachers who used the content approach and asked general questions rather than use the strategies approach had students who outperformed students in the strategies groups. What are your thoughts of these two approaches? How will the results of that study influence how you teach various comprehension strategies?