Thoughts on assessment

Last week the SEA results were released to the public. Since then their has been much public “talk show debate” on examinations. Examinations or assessment, a word that is quite popular in the Education community. It seems that the view expressed by more than one child psychologist is that traditional tests should not be the only determinant in which secondary school a child attends. In an effort for one to “keep up with the present trends” I decided to focus on the traditional test vs authentic assessment.
Assessment is authentic when we directly examine student performance on worthy intellectual tasks. Traditional assessment, by contract, relies on indirect or proxy 'items'--efficient, simplistic substitutes from which we think valid inferences can be made about the student's performance at those valued challenges. (Grant and Wiggins 1990).
A standardized test is one that is administered under standardized or controlled conditions that specify where, when, how, and for how long children may respond to the questions or "prompts." Standardized tests should meet acceptable standards for technical qualities in construction, administration, and use (Goodwin and Driscoll (1980, pp. 59-60)).
Grant and Wiggins argue that:
Authentic assessment require students to be effective performers with acquired knowledge while traditional tests tend to reveal only whether the student can recognize, recall or "plug in" what was learned out of context.
Authentic assessments present the student with the full array of tasks that mirror the priorities and challenges found in the best instructional activities: conducting research; writing, revising and discussing papers; providing an engaging oral analysis of a recent political event; collaborating with others on a debate, etc. while conventional tests are usually limited to paper-and-pencil, one- answer questions.

As a result one believes that authentic assessment would be a better. Better here as a means of assisting in planning instructional goals rather than standardized testing. It is not however the best type of test with respect to placement....

Adressing struggling adloscent readers

Serious reading problems exist among adolescent learners. Teachers can turn around this descending twist by using various strategies. One of these strategies is the scaffold reading experience (SRE). Teachers can integrate the SRE to aid the reading process in struggling students and there by assist them in the teaching of the content areas. The SRE targets 2 instructional elements: techniques and strategies. Techniques are actions the teacher takes to ensure appropriate rereading, reading, and post reading instruction .i.e. the reading process. Other strategies, such as list-group-label (H. Taba, 1967), story pyramid, and summarizing, are tools that students can use to comprehend information. Comprehending information in content areas is vital for academic success in these areas. (Evans, 2008). Academic success one believes all teachers, schools administrators, parents and the public at large wants. Vacca and Vacca (2008) notes that it is not the responsibility of the content area teacher to teach students how to read, but to use reading as a tool to “extend meaning” in a discipline (p. 11). In Trinidad and Tobago reading facilitators are not present in our schools. One still is of the view that each teacher can take a personal responsibility to ensure that the children who are faced with reading/literacy issues can cope with their mainstream education. “If there is a will there is a way”. Food for thought!!!!!!!!

Evans, C. J. (2008). Reading Success in the Secondary Classroom. Preventing School Failure Vol. 52, No. 2 , 59-66.

Assisting struggling readers

We as educators must present reading as a pleasurable activity to the struggling reader. We must be willing to use a variety of strategies( this may be a daunting task but we must strive to do it). We must adopt the position that all children can learn and also be willing to add to our knowledge about the changing trends to better equip our selves to assist the children.

Biancarosa and Snow (2004) suggest that principals and teachers address the diverse literacy needs of adolescents through a comprehensive approach encompassing the following strategies:

* Develop a school wide literacy focus, including targeted professional development and strong instructional leadership.

* Adopt a set of research-based instructional strategies, including such techniques as reciprocal teaching, graphic organizers, prompted outlines, and questioning the author, to foster reading growth across all content areas.

* Offer focused intervention classes taught by a trained reading specialist for students with severe reading deficits.

* Increase opportunities for students to choose books for pleasure reading during the school day.

* Use complementary trade books that present content textbooks' key facts and concepts in a more engaging style.

* Conduct assessments, both formal and informal, to help teachers understand the literacy needs of their students.

* Emphasize pre-reading activities, during-reading strategies, and graphic organizers to guide students in building background knowledge and creating meaning during the reading process.

So if we educators commit to doing whatever is necessary to get our children to become literate and see reading as a pleasurable activity, we would have been successful in our goal.

So in closing I'd like to leave you with some food for thought “If you can read this, thank a teacher.
~ Anonymous Teacher ~”

Biancarosa, G., & Snow, C. E. (2004). Reading next--a vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy: A report from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

The five essential components of reading

The five essential components of reading are: PHONEMIC AWARENESS, THE ALPHABET PRINCIPLE , READING FLUENCY, VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT, READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES.

Now to expand on these a bit

Phonemic Awareness (PA) is:

1. the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References).

2. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.

3. fundamental to mapping speech to print. If a child cannot hear that "man" and "moon" begin with the same sound or cannot blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run", he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word.

4. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system.

5. a strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.

The alphabetic principle is composed of two parts:

• Alphabetic Understanding: Words are composed of letters that represent sounds.

• Phonological Recoding: Using systematic relationships between letters and phonemes (letter-sound correspondence) to retrieve the pronunciation of an unknown printed string or to spell words. Phonological recoding consists of:

* Regular Word Reading

* Irregular Word Reading

* Advanced Word Analysis

Fluency (automaticity) is reading words with no noticeable cognitive or mental effort. It is having mastered word recognition skills to the point of over learning. Fundamental skills are so "automatic" that they do not require conscious attention.

Examples of automaticity:

• shifting gears on a car

• playing a musical instrument

• playing a sport (serving a tennis ball)

Vocabulary Knowledge is learning, as a language based activity, is fundamentally and profoundly dependent on vocabulary knowledge. Learners must have access to the meanings of words that teachers, or their surrogates (e.g., other adults, books, films, etc.), use to guide them into contemplating known concepts in novel ways (i.e. to learn something new).

(Baker, Simmons, & Kame'enui, 1998)

Comprehension is :

• the essence of reading

• active and intentional thinking in which the meaning is constructed through interactions between the test and the reader (Durkin, 1973)

(n.d.). Retrieved June Sunday, 2010, from http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/index.php

As an educator I'm sure that all teachers are aware of these areas and we all do teach them(even if we just give exercises from the Reading workbooks.). One wonders however how much emphasis is actually placed on these. I know that before this program one used to teach the 5 areas but usually gloss them over or even teach them during times of the day after having covered the “Big subjects” ie Maths and Language or just stick in a quick lesson to be able to writing up the record and evaluation for the week.

These days however one has placed an emphasis on these areas in fact it is best(in my humble opinion) to teach these areas at the beginning of the day(when the children's minds are fresh). One has noted a remarkable increase in the interest of all students in reading. In fact the students are a lot more eager to read aloud now than at the start of the academic year 2009.

It is very important to focus on the key concepts of reading, this sets the stage and the children will perform...

Introduction

Hello Everyone,

My name is Sheldon and I'm a Masters in Education student at the University of The West Indies. I have set up this blog in part requirements for my master's programme.

The blog posts here will be of a professional nature sharing information with respect to reading with a particular focus on young children and adolescents.

So I'm going to dive right in, the first thing I would like to address is the question of "What is reading?"

According to Wikipedia:

Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols for the intention of deriving meaning (reading comprehension) and/or constructing meaning. Written information is received by the retina, processed by the primary visual cortex, and interpreted in Wernicke's area.

Reading is a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas.

Readers use a variety of reading strategies to assist with decoding (to translate symbols into sounds or visual representations of speech) and comprehension. Readers may use morpheme, semantics, syntax and context clues to identify the meaning of unknown words. Readers integrate the words they have read into their existing framework of knowledge or schema (schemata theory).

Other types of reading are not speech based writing systems, such as music notation or pictograms. The common link is the interpretation of symbols to extract the meaning from the visual notations.

Reading is an important tool for people of many societies, allowing them to access information which might have otherwise been unavailable.

Retrieved from Reading (process)(n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 3, 2010, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process).

According to the author, children should see reading as a way to explore human adventure before they even learn how to read. An example is reading a book to her classroom. The students listen intently and express how they feel about the story and the characters that they see in the book. A brief overview of what the preschoolers are learning from their exercise in reading is the ability to make human connections to the characters and the story unfolding within the book, is presented. Topics include an in-depth discussion of the goal of teachers regarding how children approach books, such as choosing thoughtful read-a-louds and encouraging reflection. Retrieved from Ruth,S.(2010, March). Making reading meaningful. Educational Leadership, Vol67 Issue6, pp63-67. This is the first in many more posts to follow.. So bye for now and stay tuned!!!!!!