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!!!