Informing teaching

As I was reading I really liked the idea of an Intrest Inventory for the students. This inventory can come in handy for numerous reasons. I could use them in my class for writing prompts, reading books, or even science and social studies. I also like how the students can create their own topics. Right now in my class my kids are obsessed with Captain Under Pants. I thought what is the big deal from these books, so I read the book to the class 20 minutes a day. I discovered the reason why they like them is because they are gross. It's about poop, pee, mischief, and fighting. WOW very intresting for them. I get the giggles and the smerks. Another assessement that stood out to me is the teacher assessment. It was untill I read the sentences for me to complete that I took a step back and really asked myself these things. In my class I realized I need to show more enthusiaim about reading. Kids can read your emotions and when you are excited, they are excited. While I read the part about grouping based on assessment, this is all new to me. Our school is really different! We don't base our groups on TPRI or IRI testing. We use the SFA program, which suck and diffets the whole purpose for assessing. We don't even use that data. It is sad to say, I guess the teachers personally see their student's growth. Hello obviously it makes sense to arrange groups or teach based on your students scores but not us.

Chapter 7- Using informal and formal assessments

Reading this book is so funny to me because it contradicts everything my school does. Even listening to lectures in class I slide down in my chair because I know our school does that. Not by my choice by any means. The whole purpose of giving an assessment to a child is to run with it and see what they need or your class as a whole. To see how much they have progressed and reading interventions may need to take place. Self efficacy is when a student 's belief regarding his or her ability to be successful. This was first described by Bandura. The book stated that students that like to read become better readers and are more self motivated. Motivation is key when it comes to reading and being a successful reader.Guthrie and Humenick said there are three types of motivation. External- put forth effort to gain some incentives, Internal- satisfies the curiosity, and Self Efficacy- is the students belief to how well they read. A part that stuck out in the book was the classroom observations. I am guilty of saying stuff like he doesn't like to read he would rather draw, and their is nothing wrong with that. If I were to take a frequency count I'm sure it would be different. Reading journals, completing sentences, thought bubbles are all techniques to see how motivated the students are. This gives teachers an insight to the feeling about reading. I really liked the Interest inventory, in my class we have to read basal books. But, it would be nice to do an interest inventory so the students would be more intrigued.

Chapter 5- Formal Assessment

Just thinking about "Formal Assessment" is kinda scary. I personally hate the pressure of a formal assessment. I start to freak out and second guess myself. Imagine how the kids feel. In the book it says that standard scores can be used to compare them to other students and other peers. I have personally ran into using standard scores to identify a learning disablity. I have had students not be identified as LD because of this also. The students that are identified are only in certain areas. Even in some cause they can score lower than average in almost everything, but they are not low enough so they say the student is performing based on their IQ level. One kind of assessment that I really liked (because I have never seen it before) was the Kaufman test. I like the nonsense word decoding subtest because you get to see if the students know there phonics. I feel our school does not give reliable fluency test. The Woodcock Johnson test meausres fluency by being timed. Our school only does TPRI or Running records. There is no formal way to measure that. In formal testing the book talked about being test bias. Even though the publishers and the authors look at this, they still just want to sell there product. I feel cultural characterisitics and background can effect the results of the test.

Process Monitering

A new assessment that I have never heard of was Brigance inventories. This is an assessment for geared to provide an in depth comprehensive reading assessment. This is useful also for special education students who need a specific objective for their IEPs. Brigance assessments can create a graph to make intra-individual comparisons to chart there progress. It is useful in process monitoring that the student visually see a graph with an element of a slope to show the level of performance. For effective process monitoring assessments should be easily available. AIMSweb is an another computer based assessment to measure reading fluency, comprehension, early literacy skills, Spanish literacy skills, early numeracy skills, mathematical computation, spelling and written expression. This is a tracking service that is proactive. This program costs money for each student, and can be tracked weekly. This would come in handy in my school because they want to see "researched based assessments" and tracking through evidence. I'm sure this is pretty expensive too. The DIBLES (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills provides a prereading and reading skills assessment of kids from K- 6th grade. The NRP uses 7 different domains to measure reading. This program has short assessments and is low cost. There is debate over this program because DIBLES is based on a timed test. Now a days there is also computerized assessments. One of the most common program is the STAR Reading. This measures vocabulary and comprehension. This includes narratives of the students strengths and weaknesses. Another computerized assessment is DORA, Diagnostive Online reading assessment system. This program generates a report and gives recommendations. Sounds to EASY!!! At my school we have the Lexile program. I know we have it, but we have not been trained how to read the data's output. What is the point of that . In the book it says that it has a built in intervention program that can read through the student's knowledge. The lexilies have provided the students with support. Teachers need to be trained on all their school's assessments they decide to buy into. Especially how to read the data.

Informal Assessments

As a classroom teacher I personally do a lot of informal assessments. Perticularily with two students who have anexity disorder. They kinda freak out when they know they are taking a "test". The best way for me to see if they understand is through informal assessments. There are two types of assessment continum, reliability and validity assessments. Realiabilty is an estimate from 0 to 1. The book talked about all the variations of realiability like inter-rater, intra- rater, alternate form, internal consistency and test retest. It discusses how they are measured and there calulations. The stategies of validity are content, construct, concurrent, predictive, and treatment. One assessment that I was unfamiliar with was the Brigance inventory. This has mulitple sub test to show the child readiness for school and where they are at. This is to moniter their progress and develop goals. For the older students they use CIBS-R. This is used in grades 1st - 6th. This assessment measures alot of areas such as speech, spelling writing, readiness, ora reading and etc. Once all the information has been gathered it is ideal to have a RTI (Response to Intervention) model. This helps students see the progress using a slope on a graph. It can also be compared to the other students benchmark. An important acroynom I need to know is DIBELS ( Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills). There is honestly a lot of information towards the end of this chapter that I have never heard of. But, there are some good points.

Chapter 3 (the longest chapter ever)

Didn't we learn this in college earning our bachlors? I know I did or was supposed to if I wasn't partying the night before. This is like a refresher course for me. It's like I knew I am supposed to know some of this stuff, but my school doesn't do most of this. We are supposed to, but we are incapable of doing our own data so our wonderful reading "speacialist" (with no degree) does it for us. Bitter? No not at all...... just pissed off. Anyhow, chapter 3 really gets into depth about informal reading assessment, which made me realize how much more I could be doing. I finally learned what a basal reading book was, they are designed to fit the students reading level using targeting vocab words and controlled text. How do I pass my undergrad without know this, I don't know. On pg. 78 it talked about comprehension assessment using a basal reader Scott Foresman. Last year I tried to use this perticular reader for an assessment and it seemed way to easy for the students. They breezed through it. Isn't the Yopp- Singer test almost the same as the TPRI testing in first grade. We did the same thing at our school just less of the phoneme segmentation. Error analayis is very important to see what mistakes your student is making. This can be difficult to do because you have to know all various areas of reading. I am pretty familiar with IRI's. IRI is based on three reading levels: Independent, Instructional and Frustration. This depends on the number of mistakes read by the student. It is also based on wcpm- words correct per minute= Number of words correct/Number of seconds read x 60=. I always forget that formula. There are some common miscues when testing a student. Each miscue has it's own code, and depending on where you work they may not be so uptight on the correct code. Some common miscues are omission, insertion, substitution, reversals, helper words, repetion, self-correction(which is not an error), hesitation, and lack of prosody(no punctuation). One thing that is new to me is the comprehension score. We did a score for each student, but it gave us a cheat sheet. I never knew what the formula was or what it stood for. It is the number of questions- the errors/ by the total number of questions. Some faults of IRI is that is only compares the class scores and the rating of the comprehension can be different from other teachers. My favorite assessment in this chapter that I have not done as a classroom teacher is a portfolio. I like how it documents all of the students progress and they can see how they have progressed.

- Overall, I am bummed at my school's lack of confidence in their teachers. This chapter has made me realize how assessments should be done correctly. Our school even does running records, but we just do them and hand over the results. We don't disect them or really look at them. It is tough also put find time to assess all these kids. We are given a curriclum and a certain window we can test but never a set time frame. They expect use to teach like a regular day and make time to pull kids during indepedent work or recess. This is really hard because kids are coming up, and shit happens. It is always go go go go!!!

Reading Disabilities

Readings- IDEA stands for Individuals with Disabilites Education Improvement Act states that students K-12 must undergo a nondiscriminatory comrehensive educational evaluation, if the teacher detects a learning disablitiy. This comprehensive assessment should be a team evaluation not just the classroom teacher. The IDEA has identified thirteen different disabilites, the majority being mental retardation and speech impairment. This test measures a students IQ and academic achevement compared to the nation. The IDEA include the following basic reading skills, listening comprehension, oral expression, reading comprehension, written expression, math calculation and math reasoning. The NRP (National Reading Panel) includes basic reading skills, automatic word recognition and phonetic decoding skills. The standard score is 15 points to qualify between IQ and the measure of achevement. This is called the wait to fail method due to how young the students are and lack of academic experience they have. Some don't even administer it the same throughout the country. Students with dyslexia have trouble with the language. According to the IDA (Internationl Dyslexia Association), dyslexia is difficulties with accureate or fluent word recogniton and by poor spelling and decoding avilites. These difficulites typically result from a deficit in the phonological componet of language.It also may include reading comprehension and lack of vocabulary and background knowlegde. Therefore, these students need more in depth assessments. The RTI (Response to Intervention) is used by the 3 tiered model of intervention among stuggling students to fail to make aduequte progress. If this still doesn't work then other tests can be adminstered, like the adaptive behavior. This is the abiltiy to funciton independently in a classroom enviorment.
SLAAP stands for Second Language Acquisition-Associated Phenomena can have low test scores, but may not be dyslexic.
Connection-Being a 2nd grade teacher , this is right up my alley. I taught 1st grade last year, and my principal wanted my to move up with my students. Why? because I am good at child process, therefore I could get the kids idetifed faster. Out of 22 students this is my lovely group: 3 dyslexic, 4 ADHD, 2 axienty, 2 spec ed. and the rest are of course on grade level. WRONG!!! It is so hard to teach a math group of 17 when half of the class needs to be retaught or in a small group. Not of 17. Knowing that they need all these extra interventions it totally defeats the purpose of small group or one on one because almost all of them need it. Since I have some spec ed, dyslexic, and possible prospects I have to determine their progress alone. It is supposed to be with a committee, but they are so busy with TAKS grades we are just chop liver. I have to come up with the stratgies alone, with the help with one other teacher if they have time. It bums me out cause I know we can be doing so much more for kids. We don't because we are LOW economic school, no parent support, so they are pushing to find either a disabitliy, retention, placement, or on grade level. Nothing else!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!