How Well Does Assessment Inform Our Reading Instruction?

Abstract

Nowadays the word assessment is apt to conjure up unpleasant thoughts of the often acrimonious controversy involving high-stakes testing (e.g., Allington, 2002). As important as we know that debate to be, in our view there is an issue of far greater consequence facing reading educators. To what extent is the instruction they provide informed by the results of assessments? In this column, we will contrast what we believe has long been the norm for assessments with a promising trend spurred by recent U.S. federal initiatives such as Reading First. Like our colleagues in a recent article in this journal (Invernizzi, Landrum, Howell, & Warley, 2005), we see great potential for "peaceful coexistence" between policymakers and teachers when assessments are chosen and used to plan effective instruction.Consider Ms. Henderson (pseudonym), a conscientious teacher who has taught second grade for many years. Her school has always provided her with a program that offers a variety of materials and resources. This core program includes various assessment tools that help her place students in the series and monitor their progress through unit tests. This teacher does not administer all of the assessments because she feels she lacks the time to conduct them and the expertise to interpret them accurately; nor does her school provide time for her to work with her colleagues to consider these issues. Ms. Henderson's students progress through the core materials all year, though some of them fall further behind despite her efforts.At issue is how Ms. Henderson recognizes and addresses the specific needs of each of these stu-dents during this pivotal time in their development. Her core materials include supplemental strands, but she is uncertain about which students would profit from them, how to schedule such activities, and how to tell when the strands have accomplished their purpose. To complicate matters, she has collected over the years a hodgepodge of specialized materials-workbooks, kits, software, and the like. She sometimes uses these on a trial-and-error basis with her struggling students but has been largely disappointed with the results. Sometimes these materials appear to work, however, and she keeps them as a last-resort measure that might assist some of her children. If they don't seem to work, she abdicates her instructional responsibility to the Title I or special education teachers. (Title I is a U.S. federally funded program for at-risk students.) Ms. Henderson is, we suspect, typical of teachers trying to make the best of the materials they have in the limited time available to them. An alternativeNow let's contrast this teacher's approach with the more structured alternative emerging from initiatives like Reading First. We believe that the model of assessment-driven instruction embraced by this reform effort has much to recommend it. It assumes that elementary teachers will be using a core reading program and that additional materials have been purchased, both to supplement weaknesses in the core and to offer inten...

The Indicating Factors of Oral Reading Fluency of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Egypt

“…Researchers document the importance of rate, accuracy, and prosody in order to aid reading comprehension (Benjamin & Schwanenflugel, 2010;Denton et al, 2011;Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2006;Kuhn, Strauss, & Morris, 2006;Mckenna, 2002;McKenna & Stahi, 2003;Mohamed, 2006;Schwanenflugel et al, 2006;Samuels, 2004;Spooner, Baddeley, & Gathercole, 2004). Nevertheless, ORC as an indicating factor of ORF, as is the case in the current study, has received very little attention (University of Oregon, 2008).…”

“…Prosody, in the current study, refers to reading connected texts smoothly and expressively by which children show that they comprehend what they read orally (Baker & Valencia, 2012;Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008;Rasinski, 2004;McKenna & Stahi, 2003). Fluent students read with accurate prosody, and this can be judged by observing students while they read orally according to certain rubrics.…”

“…The issue is how accurate fluent readers should be? Many researchers (e.g., Abdelbari, 2011;ETS, 1995;Harris & Sipay, 1980;Hussien, in press;McKenna & Stahi, 2003) used the reading levels, independent, instructional, and frustration level, to assess www.ccsenet.org/ies…”

“…Fluent students read with accurate prosody, and this can be judged by observing students while they read orally according to certain rubrics. Some rubrics were developed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] in America in 1992 to classify students into four levels of prosody in English (ETS, 1995;McKenna & Stahi, 2003). Other rubrics were developed to assess prosody in Arabic (Abdelbari, 2011;Abu-Hajaj, 1993;Ali, 2009;Shehatah, 1981).…”

“…A review of the literature suggests that oral reading fluency (ORF) refers to reading text quickly, accurately, with good prosody, and with comprehension (e.g., Abdelbari, 2011;Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2006;Hudson, Lane, & Pullen, 2005;Hudson, Pullen, Lane, & Torgesen, 2008;Hussien, 2011;Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, & Meisineger, 2010;McKenna, 2002;McKenna & Stahi, 2003;McShane, 2005;Pikulski & Chard, 2005;Rasinski, 2004;Valencia et al, 2010). Previous research, usually in English, provides considerable knowledge about oral reading accuracy, oral reading rate and prosody as indicating variables in ORF.…”