Hello, all!

I would like to share another informal assessment technique that we developed as part of the EFF Reading Project.  We call it a "Listening-In Assessment" because it requires you to "listen in", so to speak, on what a reader is thinking as s/he is reading.   It goes something like this:

1) The student is engaged in reading for a life-based task that, in EFF lingo, relates to a shared priority.  For instance, students may be researching certain careers, or reading about parent/teacher conferences, or exploring housing options.  

2) The teacher approaches the student and has several brief discussions, using the components of the Read With Understanding standard (http://eff.cls.utk.edu/fundamentals/standard_read_with_understanding.htm) as a guide.  The teacher asks such things as:
-- Why did you choose this piece to read?  Why?  What are you hoping to find?  
-- How are you going about reading for this purpose?  Is that working for you?  
Questions like these help to understand students' decision-making processes in choosing material, whether or not they are able to choose material that they can make sense of, and ways in which they approach certain texts and tasks (e.g., do they start at the beginning or do they use a table of contents/index to pinpoint a starting place).

3)  After a brief discussion and any impromptu instruction that the teacher feels the need to provide based on student responses, the teacher leaves the student to continue with the task.  

4) Later, the teacher returns to the student and continues with the conversation, again using the RWU components as a guide.  She might ask things like, 
--How's it going?  What have you found out?
--Is the strategy I taught you working for you? (a strategy lesson might have been provided prior to students working on the task or in an impromptu lesson).
--Has anything been difficult for you to understand?  What did you do about it?
--How does what you read compare with what you already know? to what another author said? 
--What are you finding to be the author's main point?
--What are you going to do with this information?
Questions like these are aimed at getting at the student's ability to monitor their comprehension, adjust strategies, analyze information, and integrate what they are reading with what they already know.

5) The teacher might then ask the student to read aloud a section that was particularly interesting to them for some reason--novel ideas, funny, something they agreed/disagreed with.  The point here is to create an authentic reason to read aloud, i.e., to share information.  As the student reads aloud, the teacher notes word recognition issues and fluency issues.  After the student reads, the pair engage in brief conversation about what the student read.  The teacher may then ask if the meaning of any words gave the student any problems--and what they did about it.  She might also pinpoint a word or two to ask the student about.

6)  At a later point, the teacher and student might discuss the teacher notes and student perspectives on those.

Teacher notes about the "listening-in" experience are recorded on a form, which basically consists of 2 pages.  On the first page is a 2-column table, with the components of the standard in the left column and blank space for teacher observation about strategies used and instruction provided and/or needed in the right column.  On the second page are sections related to alphabetics, fluency, and vocabulary.  Notes are usually made away from the student, so the student doesn't experience the conversation as an "assessment event", but we do encourage teachers to be transparent with students about how they will regularly talk with them about their reading and make notes to share with them.  Teachers conduct these assessments regularly with each student (though they define "regularly" differently) in order to collect multiple examples of reading performance over a range of texts and tasks.  The principal purpose is to identify what students already know, what strategies/skills they are using independently and fluently, and what the instructional implications might be.  Combined with similar student-written assessments of their reading processes, either through journaling or use of the Read With Understanding Diary (http://eff.cls.utk.edu/eff_docs/toolkit_docs/tools_read_understand.doc), and with rubrics, artifacts, and reading/book logs collected in a portfolio, students and their teachers can also monitor growth in reading performance over time, as Meta suggested.

Teachers with whom we have shared this process relate that they learn so much about students' reading strategies when they conduct assessments like these, though at first, some students have trouble talking about their own reading.  However, when discussions around reading occur regularly as part of the classroom culture, not just in Listening-In Assessments but in large group and small group activities as well, students become better at recognizing what they do, naming what they do, and identifying trouble spots.  And teachers gather valuable data that can inform instruction.

Thank you all for such interesting ideas and posts this week.  I'm eager to hear what others are doing as well!

Amy

Amy R. Trawick, M.S. Ed.
Equipped for the Future National Consultant
Center for Literacy Studies
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville
atrawick at charter.net
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Marie Cora 
  To: Assessment Discussion List 
  Sent: Friday, January 13, 2006 9:26 AM
  Subject: [Assessment] Your thoughts and questions


  Hi everyone,

   

  I wanted to remind folks that this is the last day of our discussion with EFF Guests.  There has been some great conversation this week - I encourage you to take the opportunity to post your thoughts and questions today.  

  Thanks!

  marie

  Assessment Discussion List Moderator

   



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