Assessment Differentiation

While reading an unfamiliar passage for a diagnostic test, a teacher records the following errors made by a student reading at a normal pace. Actual Word in the Text Word Read by Student swam swarm siding sliding ride rider weak wreak dip drimp Based on the errors recorded, the student is struggling with which of the following while reading?

Adding consonants that are not there.

A third-grade teacher would like to assess each student's ability to summarize a short story she has read aloud to the class. Which one of the following activities should the teacher use to determine her students' mastery of this skill?

After reading the story, have students recall the main points of the story by writing them down in their journals.

Mr. Glaser, a kindergarten teacher, is looking for ways to assess his student's ability to summarize or retell reading material. Which activities could he use to help assess this skill? Select all answers that apply.

Ask students to draw what happened in the text. Ask students individually to act out a scene from the text.

Which of the following best describes a value specific to assessing with an authentic task?

Authentic tasks assess a skill being used in a context that has meaning and value outside of the classroom context.

A kindergarten student is falling behind as the class progresses through phonetic instruction. She has memorized most of the sound-to-letter pairings, but as the class prepares to move on to more complex letter combinations, the teacher is concerned that she will not be able to catch up without additional help. How should the teacher support this student's phonetic skills development?

By providing additional instruction and practice, either small-group or individualized, to ensure mastery of these skills New reading skills build on those that were taught before. It is reasonable to anticipate that these gaps will lead to more reading challenges as the skills being taught become more advanced. Giving the student additional instruction and practice now can help prevent those challenges from developing.

Which of the following is the best rationale for using formative assessment?

Students will show what skills they have mastered and what skills still need to be practiced.

The semester exam administered to students at the end of the term is considered to be a:

Summative assessment

A fifth-grade teacher would like to preserve instruction time by only testing the class's reading level twice, once at the beginning of the year to guide instruction and once at the end of the year to measure their growth. Which of the following best explains why this is would not be a reasonable change in testing expectations?

Testing a student's reading level during the year provides data on whether current instructional practices are working and presents the opportunity for teachers to better match students with appropriately leveled texts.

Which of the following is a similarity between a norm-referenced assessment and a criterion-referenced assessment?

They both formally assess a test-taker's knowledge in a specific area.

The campus administrator wants the ELL students to take a standardized test that covers basic reading skills. The test will be translated from English into each student's native language. Which of the following would best explain why such a test is unlikely to yield accurate results?

Translations from English to a native language cannot account for cultural differences which can lead to confusion among students.

Which of the following skills is NOT assessed using a reading assessment focused solely on oral fluency?

comprehension

Mr. Clark teaches a diverse population of students, including English Language Learners. Despite their necessity in many situations, Mr. Clark isn't a proponent of summative assessments. Mr. Clark would most likely support which of the following?

daily submission of homework assignments and weekly student-teacher feedback sessions

An English teacher ends each class with an exit ticket of 1-4 short questions related to the topics discussed in class that day. Students write their responses on sticky notes and place them on the teacher's door before leaving the classroom. The teacher reviews all notes and uses students' responses to determine warm-up activities for the next day of class. Which of the following methods of assessing student understanding is being used?

formative assessment

A second-grade student has shown strength in memorizing sight words and reading common, familiar words in books, but she consistently struggles with unfamiliar words even if they are decodable. Based on her specific challenge, in which of the following skills does she require further instruction?

Direct phonic instructions

Which of the following statements best describes a formative assessment?

Formative assessments measure what students know along the way.

Which of the following would be an appropriate summative assessment for fourth grade students who are learning about parts of speech?

Having students independently label each part of speech for words in a given sentence

Students in upper-elementary grades need to be able to ask appropriate questions about their own writing, such as "Did I capitalize all proper nouns and the beginning of sentences?", "Did I use proper punctuation?", and "Did I use parts of speech correctly?" Which of the following best explains the importance of this questioning?

Help students learn the process of editing their own and each other's writing. It is extremely important for students to be able to quickly see/assess errors in their own and each other's writing as they edit it.

A fourth-grade teacher is administering a student's mid-year fluency assessment. Her data shows that the student's miscues are within the range of normal for the grade level, but the student did not self-correct any errors while reading aloud. Of the following questions, which should be the first to consider when evaluating instructional strategies for this student?

Is the student able to correctly answer reading comprehension questions despite the miscues?

Ms. Ciernia decides to do a project-based assessment with her fifth-grade class in which they design their own society. Her class consists of ELLs of varied levels. She sets clear parameters using a rubric with targeted standards and skills. In which way will this assessment benefit the ELLs in her class?

It will provide opportunities for ELLs to apply what they have learned in a student-centered project.

A first-grade teacher is assessing a student's reading. After listening to the student read a passage aloud, which of the following describes the best way for the teacher to assess the student's reading comprehension in this setting?

Listen to the student give an oral summary of the passage.

Mr. Chalmers wants to evaluate the learning progress of his English language learners over the past few weeks. Since there are no major formal assessments scheduled in the upcoming week, which of the following would be the most appropriate informal assessment of the students' learning progress?

Listening in on the ELL students' group activities

A kindergarten teacher is reading a story to the class. While she reads, she pauses to point to details in the illustration. She tells students to look at the picture and asks, "How does the character feel, and how do you know?" By asking these questions, the teacher is assessing whether or not the students can:

Make inferences

While working one-on-one with a student, the teacher administers a nonsense word test. Which of the following skills is the teacher most likely trying to assess?

Phonics

A teacher needs to perform a miscue analysis for her students in order to assess progress and current skill level. After choosing a sample text, which step should the teacher take in order to give the assessment successfully?

Print copies of the sample text to record student errors.

A teacher needs to make accommodations to a nonfiction reading comprehension assignment for an English language learner who is in the beginning stages of language development. Which accommodation would be most appropriate for this student's ability level?

Provide a graphic organizer and simple, direct instructions.

Which of the following are acceptable ways to assess vocabulary? Select all answers that apply.

Provide quizzes with two columns, one for newly-studied vocabulary words and the other for synonyms of each word, for students to match up. An assessment of academic vocabulary that is multiple-choice or fill in the blank at the end of a unit. Make lists of a few words that contain common prefixes. Then have students divide the words into parts and write the meanings of the entire words.

Which of the following is NOT a benefit of incorporating self-assessment and peer-assessment into the students' writing process?

Students can help in grading writing assignments for the teacher.

Which of the following could be evidence of bias in a formal, standards based assessment?

Students of differing cultural backgrounds who have been performing similarly when informally assessed, unexpectedly score very differently from each other.

A third-grade ELL student who normally performs well on assessments unexpectedly struggled with a recent reading assessment of a passage titled "Fourth of July Memories." Which of the following is most likely to have caused this unexpected challenge?

The student may lack the schema that supports other students' understanding of the text.

A teacher notices that a student has misspelled the words "pain" and "boat" as "pane" and "bote." Based on this observation of the student's spelling, which of the following would be a reasonable assumption for the teacher to make about the student's decoding skills?

The student may struggle to decode vowel digraphs.

In a general education classroom that includes some ELL students, which of the following should be considered when choosing a passage for a summative assessment?

The subject of the passage should aim to be accessible to all students despite different backgrounds and schemas.

A teacher is administering a reading assessment to determine what level of books students should be reading independently. Which of the following types of assessments would be best for this purpose?

a criterion-referenced test

Which of the following texts would be the best choice to accurately assess a third grade ELL student's reading comprehension?

a story about an elementary student struggling with friend conflict in school A story set in school would be a good choice because it is a context with which most students would be familiar.

While reviewing a student's ELA work, the teacher asks herself these questions: Is the textbook too difficult for this student to understand? Are there any students who do not understand sentence formation? Is the student encountering difficulty with more than one word out of every twenty? Which of the following is the teacher most likely trying to do?

analyze the student's errors to determine possible changes in instruction

Which TWO strategies can be used to assess a student's reading comprehension skills? Select all answers that apply.

asking a student to identify the main idea of a story that the teacher read aloud This assesses the student's auditory reading comprehension. assigning a short essay question which requires students to include three details from the text This assesses comprehension because students who are not able to recall details or identify relevant details may not comprehend the text.

Which of the following methods could be used to test a student's decoding abilities?

asking a student to read a grade level paragraph aloud Listening to a student reading assesses both fluency and decoding.

A third-grade teacher has identified a word identification issue with a student. The teacher listens to the student read aloud, marking the miscues or words that he is unable to decode in order to better plan intervention. The teacher marked the following words while listening to the student read aloud: south awful spoil toy painter real How can the teacher best provide intervention support for this student?

by providing direct instruction and practice for vowel teams Every word that this student was unable to pronounce contained a vowel team. A vowel team, or vowel digraph, is defined as two vowels that make a single vowel sound when together in a word.

Mrs. Smithers has just completed a beginning-of-the-year assessment of her student's reading fluency skills. The results revealed that she has students with reading skills ranging from significantly below grade-level to above grade-level. To accommodate these different skill levels, Mrs. Smithers should:

differentiate instruction, offering both remediation and enrichment. Teachers should adapt instructions and materials to accommodate students at different levels with the goal in mind of seeing growth in all students.

Ongoing assessment is extremely important in writing and the writing process. Which of the following is the least important reason for ongoing assessment?

ensuring that there are many scores so no one low grade will too significantly impact their average

Mr. Franklin believes that ongoing assessments are particularly important for English language learners, but that standardized tests in English don't always reflect ELLs' true content knowledge or abilities. Instead, he is a strong proponent of performance-based assessments. Which of the following would be an appropriate performance-based activity for Mr. Franklin to use to assess ELLs' speaking or reading skills? Select all answers that apply.

giving descriptions or instructions using visual or written prompts This is a performance-based activity in which the students can be assessed on their comprehension and speaking skills. debating, either one-on-one or taking turns in small groups This is a performance-based activity in which the students can be assessed on their comprehension and speaking skills.

A third-grade teacher has just taught a lesson on identifying and describing the setting when reading a story. Which of the following activities could be used as a formative assessment to assess this new skill at the end of class?

giving students a one-page story and asking them to describe the setting in one sentence

A second-grade class is halfway through a class novel. The teacher is designing a formative assessment to determine each student's ability to make a prediction. Which of the following approaches should the teacher take when designing the assessment?

have students guess what happens next in the text and provide support with text evidence

A teacher notices that a number of her students are able to either correctly identify the number of phonemes in a spoken word or correctly identify a written word. Few students are able to both decode and encode seamlessly. Which activity below could the teacher use to help students practice decoding and encoding?

having students complete phoneme-grapheme maps for high-frequency words

Which of the following is the best way to assess the fluency skills and reading levels of sixth-grade students?

having students read aloud while the teacher listens and counts the number of words read correctly

An ESL teacher finds that many of her students, despite showing improvement in the classroom, don't do very well on formal assessments. She thinks it's because they get nervous when they know they are being tested. She wants to find another way to assess them. Her colleague should recommend:

having the students keep journals or learning logs.

Mr. Harper wants to assess his students' reading fluency by listening to each student orally read a section from a selected text. Which of the following would NOT be a good indicator for Mr. Harper to use in assessing the students' reading fluency?

how clearly students are able to pronounce words according to the norms of standard English

While asking students to draw pictures of objects that start with the letter M, the teacher walks around the room observing what students are drawing to determine how much more time needs to be spent on that skill. Which of the following describes what the teacher most likely trying to do?

informally assess student mastery of the phoneme /M/, and use the data as a formative assessment to guide instruction This scenario describes an example of a informal, formative assessment.

What is the primary goal of summative assessments?

measuring student achievement

Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of having a student retell a story they read?

measuring the student's level of comprehension

Mrs. Peterson, the principal at Northside High School, is a proponent of summative assessments. She has told Mr. Stephens that he needs to include more summative assessments in his ESL curriculum. Which of the following would Mrs. Peterson recommend?

more end of unit or chapter tests

Mr. Parks records a short sample of his students reading the same passage. He listens to all student recordings and takes notes. When it is time to assign grades, he assigns a 100% to the student who read the passage with the least errors, and continues to grade by comparing the rest of the class to the student who received the highest mark. What type of assessment is Mr. Parks using?

norm-referenced A norm-referenced test establishes an expectation of "normal" and uses that as the standard to assess student performance. By comparing student recordings to each other, he is conducting a norm-referenced assessment.

A kindergarten student is able to correctly identify all 26 letters and their sounds. She recognizes and creates rhymes, and can usually identify the first letter of objects or names when she hears the words spoken aloud. Despite these skills, she is still struggling to decode simple words, while most of the class has transitioned into using their decoding and sight-word skills to read simple books. The teacher is planning strategic reading intervention to support this student. Which of the following skills should the teacher plan to begin working on with this student?

phoneme blending

Based on the student's posttest performance, what is the most appropriate action for the teacher to take with regard to the student's mastery of the topic?

providing additional lessons in consonant blends

A student reads the following sentence aloud. I went to the dentist yesterday. He asked me to open my mouth very wide. It did not hurt. Which of the following pronunciation mistakes represents an error decoding vowel digraphs?

reading mouth as moth

A sixth-grade teacher assessed a student's reading level at the beginning of the school year and found that the student was reading on a fifth-grade level. The student was assessed again at the end of first semester and continued to read on a fifth-grade level, but with improved fluency and fewer sound errors. When assessing the student during the third quarter, the teacher found that the student was now reading at a 5.5 grade level with improved fluency and zero sound errors. Which of the following techniques is being used to assess the student?

running record

Which of the following are good examples of formative assessment? Select all answers that apply.

self and peer assessments listening to a student read aloud, one-on-one, then discussing what was read observations in the form of close monitoring and feedback while students are working

While listening to a student read, a teacher records the following errors in pronunciation. Word Student Pronunciation Cologne ku-log-neh Sword s-WOR-d Raspberry RASP-ber-rie Based on the errors in all three words, the student is struggling with which phonics pattern?

silent letters

A first-grade student is struggling to decode words containing multiple syllables. While investigating what could be causing the problem, the teacher notices that she is able to read and spell single-syllable words accurately most of the time. What skill should the teacher revisit to help improve this student's decoding skills?

structural analysis

Mrs. Langston is an English teacher and requires her students to keep a portfolio of their writing assignments, which includes drafts and final copies. The greatest benefit to the portfolios is that:

students can view how their writing has improved over time.

When students self-select books, the teacher requires them to use the five finger rule. Which of the following goals is the teacher most likely trying to achieve?

teach students to independently assess the readability level of a text

Ms. Hardy demonstrates the five finger rule to her students and explains how to use the rule to select the students' independent reading material. Which of the following is Ms. Hardy most likely trying to develop in her students?

the ability to gauge the readability level of texts. The five finger rule is when a student picks up a book he would like to read, turns to any random page, reads the full page, and holds up one finger for every word he doesn't know. If the student holds up five or more fingers, then the book is too difficult. The five-finger rule is used to gauge the readability of a text.

A third-grade teacher is facilitating literature circles for her class with books that tie into their current social studies unit. The class will be allowed to choose a title from a set of books that she has pre-selected. The teacher introduces each option by showing the front cover, reading the title, and reading the back of the book. Once students choose their book and begin reading it, they will be given opportunities to meet with other students who are reading the same book. All group members are encouraged to use direct quotes from the text to support the ideas they share with their group. Which of the following would be most important for a student to consider when choosing their book from the provided options?

the book's readability using the 5 finger test It would be important for a student to evaluate the how challenging the text in the context of their own reading ability.

Formative assessments provide information that can be used for which of the following?

to change and improve instruction

Which of the following describes the best use of a running record?

to track student reading progress over a year

Mrs. Crow provides her students a self-assessment rubric to complete after a semester-long group research project. Which of the following does a self-assessment rubric best promote among students?

understanding and taking responsibility for their learning. It would best allow students to understand and take responsibility for their learning because students are able to ask introspective questions that will help them understand themselves as learners.

Mr. Rose has two students who are struggling with writing in his fourth-grade class. He has them write two sentences which he dictates to them. From these papers, he checks their spelling and writing development. Which skill would NOT be assessed by the checking of these writing/spelling papers?

understanding of expository text Assessing writing and spelling development has nothing to do with expository text. Expository text is written material that contains facts such as textbooks, magazines, etc.

Which of the following is not an effective method of utilizing classroom data?

using growth measures as rationale to move on to new skills

In order to best assess students' understanding of multimedia and communication skills, teachers should: Select all answers that apply.

utilize multiple formative and summative assessments. Formative and summative assessments used throughout a unit will help guide instruction and demonstrate student understanding. provide students with opportunities to interact and demonstrate command of various types of visual media. Students need lots of opportunities to interact with all the types of visual media. Students need lots of opportunities to interact with all the types of visual media.