Reading Assessment and Instruction

Background Knowledge

(schema or prior knowledge) information or experience that the student has prior to learning (When students can connect their background knowledge to the texts they read, it aids their comprehension.)

Performance-Based Assessment

A kind of assessment that requires students to show mastery of specific skills by demonstrating, producing, or performing something (designing and performing experiments, building models, writing poems or shorts stories, and developing portfolios)

Five Finger Rule

A method of determining a book's readability by limiting unknown words per page to 2-3

Running Record

A reading assessment administered as a student reads aloud and a teacher listens (Teachers may record miscues, note strategies used, observe fluency, and time for WPM to determine the next steps of action for a student's reading instruction, including whether or not a student should move up a text level for guided reading.)

Independent Reading Level

A reading level in which a student can read and comprehend independently. They have difficulty with no more than one out of every twenty words.

Instructional Reading Level

A reading level that is challenging for the student but manageable with teacher support. They have difficulty with no more than one out of every ten words.

Frustrational Reading Level

A reading level that is difficult for the student and would require extensive teacher support for student comprehension

Exit Slips

A short formative assessment given by a teacher after completing a lesson to determine the degree to which students have learned the material taught in the lesson.

Timed Reading

A strategy in which a teacher listens to a student read a passage from a grade level novel for a set period of time

Literature Circles

A strategy in which a teacher organizes students into small groups to discuss a common text.

Quantitative Measures of Texts

Aspects of a text that are too hard for a reader to measure. These are typically measured by computer software. (word length, frequency of difficult words, sentence length, text cohesion)

Qualitative Measures of Texts

Aspects of a text that can only be measured by a reader (meaning or purpose, structure, language, conventionality and clarity, knowledge demands)

Reader and Task Considerations

Aspects of reading a text that relate to the reader or the reader's purpose in reading the text. These considerations are determined and measured by teachers based on their professional judgement, knowledge of their students, and knowledge of the subject. (Reader considerations include: -motivation -knowledge -experiences Task considerations include: -the complexity of the assignment related to the reading -questions asked about the reading)

Diagnostic Assessment / Pre-Assessment

Assessment administered before instruction to determine students' strengths and weaknesses

Schema (when reading)

Background knowledge a reader brings to a text. (Someone who plays baseball can use his experience to understand a biography of Babe Ruth.)

Sentence Stems

Common sentence starters provided to students to use when generalizing, summarizing, or transitioning between ideas. ("According to the author..." "We see in Chapter 2 that..." or "While X does this, Y...")

Informal Assessments

More flexible than formal assessments and can be adjusted to fit the situation and particular needs of the student being tested (observations during a lesson)

Guided Reading

Reading done by students with teacher support. This reading will be done within the framework of a lesson and often in a small group setting with the teacher.

Reliability

Reliable exams produce the same scores when given in the same conditions (same individuals on different occasions or with different sets of equivalent items)

Formal Summative Assessment

Tests given at specific points in time in order to determine what students know and don't know (State assessments, district benchmarks, semester or six weeks tests, and end of unit or chapter)

Criterion-Referenced State Tests

Tests in which a standard has been set for the test taker to achieve in order to pass the test. (A multiple choice or short answer test on the content of a unit of study in which a 70% is needed to pass.)

Norm-Referenced Tests

Tests that compare an individual's performance/achievement to a group called the "norm group." (An IQ test)

Validity

The ability of a test or question to measure what it purports to measure

Evaluative Comprehension

The ability to analyze text by questioning whether it is fact or opinion, determining if there is faulty reasoning, and explaining how the characters are developed. (Explain why you think this story is factual or an opinion.)

Reading Fluency

The ability to read with appropriate speed, accuracy, and prosody

Alphabetic Knowledge

The ability to recognize, name, and write letters.

Morphology

The study of forms of words, including affixes, roots, stems, and parts of speech. (The word "bicycles" is made up of three individual morphemes. The prefix bi-, the stem cycle, and the suffix -s.)

Alphabetic Principle

The understanding that there is a logical/systematic relationship between the sounds of spoken English and the letters and letter-patterns of written English.

Literal Comprehension

Understanding of the facts in the written text such as stated main idea or specific details. (What were the names of the main character's parents in the story we just read?)

Inferential Comprehension

Understanding parts of the written text without it being stated explicitly such as determining cause and effect, drawing conclusions, and making predictions. (What was the cause of the children in the story being locked out of their house?)

Phonics / Graphophonemic Principle

Using the relationship between symbols (letters and words) and sounds of a language to read and write

Genre

Various forms of texts including short stories, essays, folktales, fairy tales, poetry, historical fiction, biographies and autobiographies, memoirs, comedies and tragedies.

Retell

a comprehension strategy in which students retell or tell differently what they have read or listened to (When students retell a story, they are demonstrating their comprehension of the most important parts.)

Small Group Instruction

a few members of the class learning together, as opposed to whole-group instruction (The students rotated through learning stations while the teacher pulled a few students to her table at a time for small group instruction.)

Speed

a measure of how fast an object's position changes, calculated from distance/time

Audiobook

a recording of a reading of a book

Alphabet

a set of basic written symbols, or letters, that represent the phonemes of a language (The English alphabet consists of 26 letters, each with one or more sounds.)

Individualized Instruction

a teacher builds a lesson to meet a specific student's needs (Individualized instruction can help struggling readers to overcome gaps in their skills, but it's often hard to find enough time to devote to it.)

Think Aloud

a teaching strategy in which a teacher states his/her thoughts aloud to demonstrate how the students should go about solving a problem or understanding a text (Math teachers model thinking by reading a problem aloud and verbalizing figuring out what it is asking what needs to be done. Language arts teachers ask themselves questions about the text as they read aloud.)

Ongoing Curriculum Based Assessment

a type of assessment used to track student progress throughout instruction (Ongoing curriculum-based assessments can be used to assess the effectiveness of an instructional plan)

Formal Assessments

a usually post-instruction assessment with the purpose of assessing student knowledge, retention, and application. Often involve the use of a standardized rubric or scoring guide based on several criteria. (chapter tests, semester tests)

Graphic Organizer

a visual display of the relationships between facts and ideas (Graphic organizers, such as story maps, timelines, venn diagrams and K-W-L charts, help students organize information.)

Logographic Writing System

a writing system in which characters represent words or phrases (Some languages, such as Chinese, use a logographic writing system.)

Syllabic Writing System

a writing system in which each character represents a syllable (Some languages, such as Japanese, use a syllabic writing system.)

Alphabetic Writing System

a writing system in which there is a symbol for each consonant and vowel (The English language uses an alphabetic writing system, but not all languages are represented in that way.)

Absence of Bias (in Assessment)

an assessment should not contain content that can be triggering to some students, but not others (To ensure the absence of bias, test questions should be based on common situations that all students encounter.)

Ongoing Assessment

an assessment that guides the pace and content of instruction (Ongoing assessments are used to determine student knowledge and dictate whether the class is prepared to move on to a new skill.)

Congruent Assessment

an assessment that tests the learning outcomes described in the learning objectives (A congruent assessment should include questions that determine whether students have achieved the learning objectives set at the start of the unit.)

Miscue

an incorrect guess of a word when reading (Suzy read "The snow was extra." instead of "The snow was exciting.")

Reader's Workshop

an instructional model that balances direct whole class instruction with independent practice time, small group meetings, and individual teacher and student meetings (A teacher generally begins a Reader's Workshop with a short lesson on a skill that the students are then asked to apply while reading independently during workshop time)

Formative Assessments

assessment for learning. Usually mid-instruction assessment with the purpose of assessing student progress and informing the teacher so instruction can be altered as needed. (graphic organizers, games)

Summative Assessments

assessment of learning. Given at specific points in time in order to determine what students know and don't know. Summative assessments are generally formal. (State assessments, district benchmarks, semester or six weeks tests, and end of unit or chapter)

Structural / Morphemic Analysis

breaking up a word and using the recognizable pieces to help in decoding

Language Interference

differences between a learner's native language and the language being learned, which can cause confusion in the acquisition of the new language (When a learner applies knowledge from one language incorrectly to another language resulting in word, syntax or pronunciation errors.)

Clarity of Language

does not contain ambiguous pronouns, words at too high a vocabulary level, or slang terms

Homogeneous Group

group comprised of individuals working on the same level (A small group of students reading a book together on the same reading level is a homogeneous group.)

Heterogeneous Group

group comprised of individuals working on various levels (A small group of students with varying academic abilities working together on a science project is a heterogeneous group.)

Flexible Grouping

grouping students based on their learning needs or interests (After reviewing the student test results, a teacher can use flexible grouping to organize groups based on students' areas of weakness.)

Word Awareness

knowing that individual words make up a sentence ("A brown cat jumped over the car." has 7 words)

Appropriate Level

leveled to where the content was taught

Punctuation

marks, such as period, comma, and parentheses, used in writing to separate sentences and their elements and to clarify meaning.

Positive Language Transfer

occurs when L1 knowledge facilitates the acquisition of L2 (Positive language transfer occurs when students use what they know about sentence structure in their native language to help them understand sentence structure in the language they are acquiring.)

Progress Monitoring

periodic assessments to monitor student growth and evaluate the effectiveness of instruction (The teacher prepared a progress monitoring assessment to see how much each student had improved and learn if his new instructional approach was effective.)

Interest Survey

questions that ask students the types of books they enjoy reading (given by the teacher at the beginning of the year to determine what books to assign to meet the interests of the class)

Independent Reading

reading done by students independent of the teacher. This reading can be either assigned or student selected. Typically silent.

Limited Vocabulary

smaller or more restricted bank of words than is typical (Student says "that one" instead of referring to item by specific name.)

Differentiation

teaching that offers multiple options for learning the material based on different student needs and learning styles

Curriculum-Based Assessments

testing the curriculum being taught

Rhyme Awareness / Rhyming

the ability first to hear words that rhyme and then to be able to produce a rhyme(s) ("Blue" and "Flew" rhyme)

Phoneme Blending

the ability to blend two sounds to make a word (Blend together these sounds to make a word: /b/ /a/ /t/ to form bat.)

Phoneme Segmentation

the ability to break down a word into separate sounds, as they say and count each sound (How many sounds are there in the word bug? /B/ /u/ /g/? There are three.)

Phoneme Isolation

the ability to can hear and recognize the individual sound in words (What is the first sound you hear in dog? /d/)

Onset and Rime Production

the ability to hear and understand that the sound(s) before the vowel in a syllable is the onset, and the vowel and everything that comes after it in a syllable is the rime (In the word cat, the onset is /c/ and the rime is /at/)

Syllable Awareness / Syllabication / Syllable Segmentation

the ability to hear individual parts/syllables of words ("Education" has four syllables "ed-u-ca-tion")

Phonemic Awareness / Sound Awareness

the ability to hear, identify, and re-create individual sounds in spoken words (A student can hear that"B" makes first sound in the word "blue")

Phoneme Addition

the ability to make a new word(s) by adding a phoneme to an existing word (What new word can you make by adding a sound to the beginning of at? Bat, cat, rat, and sat.)

Phoneme Manipulation

the ability to perform phoneme deletion, addition, and substitution.

Reading Comprehension

the ability to read a text and understand its meaning

Phoneme Deletion

the ability to recognize and understand a word or sound(s) that remain when a phoneme is removed. ("What is bat without the /b/?" "at")

Phoneme Substitution

the ability to substitute one phoneme for a different one (replace the first sound in 'bug' with 'r' . Rug)

Capitalization

the action of starting a word with a capital letter to signify a certain characteristic (The rules of capitalization differ in each language; for example, Spanish does not capitalize the days of the week, whereas English does.)

Lexicon

the collective vocabulary of a person or language (Reading over the summer increased the student's lexicon for the following school year.)

Directionality

the direction in which a language is read (The directionality of written English is from left to right.)

Words per Minute (WPM)

the number of words a student reads correctly in a 60-second time span

Speed (when reading)

the pace at which the reader reads the text

Prosody

the reader's ability to convey expression, including using correct emphasis, punctuation, and tone, while reading aloud

Accuracy (when reading)

the reader's ability to correctly pronounce words

Phoneme

the smallest individual sounds in a word (The word "bit" has three phonemes - b - i - t.)

Learning Objectives

the specific skill or knowledge that the student is expected to master in a lesson (The students will be able to appropriately use a question mark.)

Whole Class Instruction

the teacher presents the same information in the same way to the entire class at the same time (A teacher typically uses whole class instruction for short lessons or modeling.)

Miscue - Insertion

when the reader adds a word or group of words to the text (An enthusiastic reader adds the word "very" into a dialogue when reading.)

Miscue - Self-Correction

when the reader recognizes and corrects an error (A student notices that what he just read doesn't make sense and goes back to correct his error.)

Miscue - Repetition

when the reader repeats a word or group of words in the text (When reading, a student stumbles on his words and goes back to the beginning to restart the sentence.)

Miscue - Substitution

when the reader replaces the word in the text with a different word (A reader reads, "She completed from A, B and C" instead of, "She completed form A, B and C")

Miscue - Omission

when the reader skips over a word or group of words in the text (A reader who struggles with eye tracking skills omits an entire line when reading a text aloud.)

Miscue - Pause

when the reader stops briefly either before or in the middle of a word (An English language learner pauses before pronouncing the word, "rural," because "r" sounds are difficult for him.)