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!!!