Assessment That Informs Instruction- Don't Just Guess--Assess (Source)
Oh, terrific. Great.
Thanks, everybody, for being with us today. I'm Francis Mary D'Andra. This screen, the title screen, also has my email address, literacy2@mindspring.com. And if you ever want to contact me offline, or if we run out of time for your questions, feel free to email me.
We're going to slide fairly quickly through the slides today. But the slides are in the handout that I provided to Perkins, and you'll be able to have all of the information on the slides. What I'm going to do is we're going to go through the slides and just summarize the information. And we'll move fairly quickly so we can fit this into an hour. It's a big topic, and we'll do the best we can to get through it.
So the four things we're going to really focus on today-- we're just going to talk a little bit about what are some elements of effective reading instruction as well as why it's so important for us as teachers of students with vision impairment to monitor the reading and writing process of our students. And we'll look at some approaches and tools for assessing students and why it's so important to work with classroom teachers.
So I'm going to start first by just talking a little bit about what we know about reading and writing. And one of the studies that has had the most profound effect on reading instruction in elementary classrooms in the last decade has been the National Reading Panel, which identified five essential elements that should be included in reading programs. And those of you who are working with elementary school students now are probably quite familiar with these. But let me just talk about them briefly.
One is phonemic awareness, which focuses on the sounds of words, that students understand that words are made up of individual sounds that can be manipulated. Phonics, which is understanding that those sounds also have symbols associated with them, that they can be used for decoding. Vocabulary development and its relationship to comprehension-- comprehension, which, of course, is the reason why we read. We read to understand. And fluency, which has to do with smooth reading with expression and at an appropriate pace.
So the National Reading Panel had a huge effect. But there's other evidence from the recent research related to the importance of motivation in reading, how important it is to use the literature and also the importance of writing as well. Another fairly recent piece of this puzzle that I'm sure a lot of you have heard about that I wanted to mention here as we think about why literacy assessment is so important and what is going on with our students is the Common Core State Standards.
And there are standards for English, language arts, and mathematics. And this slide also has the link to their website, www.corestandards.org. And the reason I bring up the Common Core State Standards-- whether or not you're in a state that has adopted the Common Core State Standards-- there's 40-some states that had initially adopted them, and now there are a few that are rethinking that for all kinds of interesting reasons, primarily because of the standardized assessment piece.
But the reason I bring these up is that I think this is another thing that's going to have a profound effect on instruction in classrooms. So I encourage you to download the English language arts standard-- and the math, of course-- from their website. One of the important things that they talk about in the Common Core Standards is for students to be college and career ready.
So that means while they're reading and writing, they're showing independence, they're building strong content knowledge, that they understand that literacy-- in response to varying demands, that not only are they comprehending, but they're also critiquing and evaluating those higher-level skills, that students understand the importance of evidence for what they're reading, and they're able to be these 21st-century literacy users with technology and digital media.
So I think that's also going to be starting to show up in our classrooms if it's not already. In addition to the-- why can't I move my slides, Robin? Because the little thing has disappeared. There we go. Thank you. I've got it. Thank you.
So what will the effect be on reading? And what we're going to see, I think, in states that are using the Common Core State Standards for English language arts will be a focus on text complexity. Students will be reading texts of greater complexity, and there will be a lot greater emphasis on informational text, not just narrative, especially in upper grades.
We'll see an increased emphasis on writing and different kinds of writing for different audiences. I'm actually quite pleased to know that the English language arts standards include speaking and listening-- we already know how important that is for our students as well-- as well as language.
So in addition to the effect of other reading research, including the National Reading Panel, I think that we're going to start seeing this greater emphasis on reading different kinds of texts at higher comprehension levels, critiquing, evaluating, and speaking and listening as well.
So what about our Braille readers? What do we know about our Braille readers and their literacy skills? Well, I'm going to focus-- there's quite a bit of research that's been published, but I'm going to focus specifically on one piece, the Alphabetic Braille and Contracted Braille Study, the ABC Braille study, which many of you are probably familiar with.
But briefly, I'll just tell you it was a longitudinal study that was done within the last decade. It was originally started by Dr. Anne Corn at Vanderbilt, and there's a huge team of people who worked on this project.
Dr. Diane Wormsley-- after Anne Corn retired, Dr. Diane Wormsley took on leadership. This was funded primarily through the American Printing House for the Blind with additional funding from other sources, including the Canadian Braille Literacy Foundation.
And the study gives us some information about literacy acquisition. The original study questions looked at the impact on contraction use and outcomes for students over time. And I encourage you to look at the special literacy issue of the Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness-- that was in October, November 2009-- for additional articles about it.
The next few slides are some of the findings that I think as a field, we really need to think about and what we need to do about it. So two of the big takeaway messages from that study was that over the years of the study-- as I said, this was longitudinal. We followed students as they began their reading and writing instruction in Braille. Only about half of the students in the study maintained or showed expected growth from year to year in vocabulary, spelling, and in overall reading level.
And that's, I think, an alarming thing that we need to think about as a field. All of the students in the study were typical learners. None of the students had additional disabilities. These were all students who were simply Braille readers with no additional disabilities.
And yet only half of them were making that grade to grade-level improvement. Another takeaway message was that the students who had the highest number of contractions-- there was a relationship between the number of contractions that students learned and higher achievement from each grade.
So what was interesting-- and I think something that we really need to reflect on-- is that no matter what reading method was used, whether it was patterns or a guided reading program or other commercial programs, our students, especially in first and second grade, really struggled reading continuous texts. They were fairly good with flashcards and individual words, but what they really needed was reading passages-- sentences, passages, stories, continuous text.
And another area of difficulty, especially in the older grades for the students in the study, was in vocabulary. Spelling was not actually an issue, at least in this study. We found that the students-- even those who use contracted growth from the beginning-- were not negatively impacted by using contracted Braille. So spelling errors were not related.
But by the end of the study, the students who had reached the highest achievement levels were those who had learned the most contractions the fastest. So we do believe that students should plan the rate of introduction based on student data. And that is progress monitoring, which we'll talk about in a minute.
But probably the biggest message that we came away with is that we really need to be thinking of reading as a process. And as teachers of students with visual impairment, if we overemphasize memorization or individual flashcards and drilling, it can distract us from the process of teaching children how to read and write.
And we have some work to do. We need to think about, as teachers, what are we going to do about building vocabulary. How about reading level and fluency? Why is it that our students in the study were losing ground over time? And also, writing as well-- how can we make sure that our students are doing more writing, more writing for a purpose, connected writing-- not just fill in the blanks, not just single words, but the writing process.
So as a team, the ABC Braille study team came away with a message that as teachers of students with visual impairments, as TVIs, our role is not just teaching a code. We really need to be focusing on reading instruction. In the same way that it doesn't make sense to talk about print as just a code, that we're focusing on code only, we really need to be thinking about how our students who are Braille readers are reading and writing.
So we can make a difference by teaching, reading along with the entire classroom team, talking at the IEP about how we can best do that, working within the classroom with teachers of paraprofessionals, with families, and making sure that there's plenty of Braille in our classrooms.
So when I was thinking about this presentation and working with classroom teachers, and the presentations that I do around the country and teachers that I talk to, if we are to really think about how we can work closely with classroom teachers to make sure our students are getting high-quality reading instruction, then even if we're not the teacher of record, which seems to be a term that comes up over and over again in various states, we should at least consider ourselves a co-teacher of reading for our Braille learners.
That means that we really have to understand what the grade level standards are for that grade. We need to be familiar with what is it that is expected of second graders. What is it that a third grader should be doing? By the end of first grade, what skills should my students have?
So understanding what those grade level standards are, and really working for our students to reach that-- we have to have really high expectations that our students will be on grade level, keeping in mind individual differences and individual needs for students. All of our kids come from different places. But as much as possible, to think about how our students can be on grade level-- what opportunities do they have for reading and writing Braille to be on grade level?
And for those of us who have worked itinerantly, how can our students make sure that they get good feedback from their reading and writing? How are we going to make sure that there's somebody who understands Braille well and can help our students as they're learning so that they get good feedback on their reading and writing attempts?
It also means that we don't want to just guess. We don't want to just assume that our students are making progress. We really need to assess where our students' strengths are that we can build on, and also what their needs are. What is it that we want to focus our instruction on so that our time is spent most valuably, as well as what can we build on that our students have?
And that means a lot of very strong communication with the classroom teacher if our students are in a neighborhood school and with the entire team. So that goes as well with instruction, that the classroom teachers and parents understand the instruction that we're giving for our students, that we are scheduling our instruction to allow the greatest participation in classroom activities for our students. We don't want our kids to be passive. We want them to be active participants in the classroom, and participating in all activities, and to be engaged throughout the day.
So we have to come up with some ways of communicating clearly with the classroom teacher, with the families, with the rest of the plans, and also discussing and planning for ongoing assessment. Because what we don't want is for our kids to somehow fall through the cracks as people are assuming, oh, he must be doing well.
So when we're thinking about what good readers do, whether they're print readers or Braille readers, students with low vision who are using print or dual media Braille-- we know that our good readers are students who automatically recognize words. They have a lot of words that they know automatically. They don't have to sound them out or figure them out.
However, if they get to words that they don't know, then we know our good readers have strategies for figuring out those words. They sound them out. They decode them. They use phonics skills. Maybe they use analogy. They use queuing systems.
We also know that our good readers make sense while they read. They're comprehending and they're monitoring their own comprehension as they go through. They're making sense while they read, connecting ideas. They're anticipating what might come next. They're making inferences from the text. They're asking questions about what they're reading.
They remember details about what they're reading. And they're using strategies. And this came up when we were talking about the Common Core just a minute ago. They don't approach every text from the same way. You might read a set of directions differently than you might read a folk tale or a fable. You might read your health textbook in a different way.
So good readers are strategic. They have goals for reading, and they also read aloud with expression because they comprehend what they're reading. The other thing that good readers do is that they read a lot. They read for pleasure and for learning. And we'll get back to that idea in a minute. But there is a relationship between the amount of reading that students do and their success. So we want our kids to enjoy reading and to read for pleasure.
So how do we make sure that our kids are becoming these good readers that we want them to? Why are we doing assessment? To make sure that our kids are on track. And on this slide, why do literacy assessment, I put, in my opinion, from the least important to most important.
And by least important, the first one I have is political realities of the time. I don't mean that it's not important that our students are participating in those assessments. What I mean is that we understand and realize now how testing has become a big part of education, and we understand that. And we also understand our roles as TVIs, making sure that our students get accommodations and that the assessments are appropriate for our students.
But to me, more important is that a good literacy assessment will help us understand the progress that our students are making, the development they're making. It also helps us determine whether the program that they're in is actually effective or not. Are they making the progress? Is there something that we can change? Is there an intervention? Is there a new method we should try? Is the program working for our students?
A good assessment will help us develop IEP goals, which is important. What are the current levels? What do we want to work on the next year so that we're really making sure that our kids are making progress throughout the year? But to me, two of the most important reasons for literacy assessment-- one is that it guides our instruction. A good assessment should tell us where to go next.
And something that I think we often forget about is that a good assessment should motivate our students. Our students should be excited about the progress they're making. They should be able to track their own progress and to see how they're getting stronger and better and being able to read longer pieces, to write longer amounts of time.
It's motivating to students when they see that they're doing well and how much they're learning. And I think sometimes we forget about that, about how important it is to motivate our students and how motivating it can be for them as they see the progress that they're making.
A good assessment will help us answer these questions. What are the current levels right now? Where is the student functioning? What is it that he or she can do? So then what's the next step? What do I need to do to build on that? What are the next steps for instruction? And Then what instructional methods seem to make the most difference for our students to make the most progress?
And just a reminder that assessment is not just the product. It's not just the score or the grade level or whatever, but it's what we can learn through the process that's also important. So assessment is a process, not just a [INAUDIBLE] or a score or an ABC grade.
So when we talk about progress monitoring, we're really talking about that formative assessment. As the school year is going on, we're making sure that our students are making progress month to month, quarter to quarter so that when we look at these summative assessments at the end of the year or at the end of a unit or something, that we're able to see how our students are making growth, and also that we're documenting the needs.
So we can certainly make our own assessments, and some of the ones we'll be talking about in a minute are teacher made. But there's also commercial assessments that we can use that we can put into Braille. We can talk with-- if your school has a reading specialist or a reading coach or a Title I teacher, the classroom teacher, and looking ourselves at what is already available, for example, in Braille. And the progress monitoring, then, can help the entire team focus on specific needs so that we can best plan for instruction.
So whenever we're doing an assessment or reading and writing, we always want to ask what exactly are we assessing. What specific information can we get about the student from this assessment? What is it that we can learn from this?
And for this particular child, this individual, what is it that we're tracking? What is it that we're paying attention to? So we have students, and we're trying-- maybe we have a student who's struggling a little bit. Maybe our student, we discover, is falling behind a little bit or just not making the progress that we think that student should be making.
We want to first consider some of the following things. And one is how consistently is that student getting reading instruction. Especially for our Braille readers, is that student getting reading instruction every single day? And how much? What's the amount of instruction? How many hours? What's the intensity of that instruction?
When we compare our students to their peers, are they getting-- is it 100 minutes? What is the standard for the English language arts block in that school, in that classroom? And is our student getting a similar amount of instruction consistently and with the intensity that's needed for that student to make progress? And I think that's something else that, as a field, we certainly could be talking about.
We should also be looking at the method of reading instruction. There's not just one method that's going to be best. So perhaps the method that is being used in that classroom needs to change in some way. Look at the classroom environment. Is Braille truly being used throughout the day? Is it a Braille-rich environment? Is the calendar in Braille? Are things labeled in Braille? Is the student able to find things in Braille that the students have access to in print?
And before we can say, oh, our students are not making progress, we want to really carefully diagnose what exactly do we mean. Is the student not reading fluently? Does the student seem to have difficulty identifying words? Is the student having difficulty with comprehension? Maybe they read beautifully, but then you ask them-- tell me what that story is about, and they have no idea. So careful diagnostic assessment at this level is really important so that you can pinpoint what is it that we have to work on.
And then again, what is the students' strengths and what are their challenges. What are the needs that we should be focusing on? So there's a lot of information as far as reading and writing that we can gather about students and about their reading. So instead of just saying, well, they're not doing well, what specifically do we mean?
So this slide, which is information to gather, has a list of various things that we can be looking for. Is the student activating prior knowledge? Are they reading something and saying, oh, this reminds me of the time that I did this, or I remember when we went to the zoo, or I remember this so they're bringing what they know about the world to reading? Are they able to go back and gather information from what they've read and confirm and check their understanding?
Here's an important one, I think, that we need to pay attention to, is matching voice to text. When the child is reading aloud, is the Braille that's under their fingertips what is coming out of their mouth? And for some of our young students, at the beginning stages, they often memorize very quickly and very easily. So are you sure that they're actually reading and that they actually haven't memorized this? But what is under their fingers is what they're actually saying.
And some of the other things we've already talked about-- that they're reading using flexible strategies or reading different things in different ways. Another one we want to check is can they read silently with comprehension. We focus a lot on oral reading, but we don't want to forget about silent reading, especially as kids get older.
And then some of the other things on this list of things that I mentioned earlier in relation to the Common Core standards as far as being able to summarize and critique and evaluate-- not just call out the details from what they remember, not the recall, but also making inferences and that higher-level thinking.
So there's a number of different assessments that we can use as teachers of the visually impaired. So even if you're saying to yourself, well, I'm not a reading instructor, and I don't know how to do this, we are teachers. And so the assessments that I chose to focus on, just with this short presentation today, are things that we as TVIs really can do. And let me go over some of these in the next few slides.
And the first one that I think, again, we often don't think about, but it is really critically important, is observation and how observation can be used for assessment. I think sometimes, we downplay the importance of kid watching as the Goodmans talk about.
So we can keep anecdotal notes about our students as they're reading. And it could be that we're keeping track of maybe their oral reading fluency. Maybe we can keep track of their comprehension. Can they retell the story in their own words? Are there comments that the student is making as he or she is reading that lets you know about their interest or motivation?
And these are things that we can share with parents or ask parents or classroom teachers about. But it also helps us in developing our quarterly reports and IEPs. Because if we don't-- maybe it's just me and my terrible memory, but I think it's really important that we keep some sort of system for documenting what our students are doing informally as well as formally. And those anecdotal notes can be really helpful to you working with IEP teams and also when you're writing quarterly reports. As I said, I think sometimes we downplay how important those observations are.
Another piece of observation is for us to periodically schedule some time, even if it's five minutes or so, where we can observe the student in the classroom. Is she raising her hand to participate in a discussion? Does he know where all of his materials are, and he gets them himself instead of having the magic fairy come and bring his Braille books to him?
Are they interacting with peers? Are they sitting passively and just listening, or are they actively engaged in the classroom and sometimes coming five, ten minutes early, coming at a different time if you can work that out in your schedule? And just taking a few minutes to observe your student in the classroom can be very important and give you a lot of information sometimes that might have been overlooked. So don't downplay the importance of observation.
Another one that can give us a lot of information about students' reading and whether they are comprehending while they're reading and monitoring their comprehension is something called the Cloze, technique, C-L-O-Z-E. And basically, this is for students who are reading aloud, and then you ask them what they describe, and they-- I don't know. And maybe they're not paying attention while they're reading.
You get a passage at the student's independent level or instructional reading level, and you remove every seventh word. And the student reads the passage and is asked to fill in the blank while they're reading. So on this slide, I have an example of one. This is a story from the qualitative reading inventory. So I already knew that it would happen to be on the student's independent reading level, and I didn't have to make up a passage. I was able to find one. And you can also find these online, and you can download them and put them into Braille.
This one is about Johnny Appleseed. And the first sentence is full. John Chapman was born in 1774, grew up in Massachusetts. So you have a topic sentence that has no blanks. And then about every seven to 10 words, there's the blank.
He became a farmer and learned blank to grow. And your student might say how to grow different kinds of crops, blank, trees. Crops and trees. And John especially liked to grow and blank apples-- eat apples, harvest apples, bake apples, whatever would make sense in that blank.
The neat thing about this is that it really helps kids focus on the meaning of what they're reading and anticipating what makes sense. If you have students who are doing these who are filling in words randomly, or they're putting in words that only make sense-- the trees-- for the phrase, but not in the sense of the whole sentence, then that might show you this is a student who needs to focus more on this comprehension monitoring and what makes sense.
For Braille readers, what I've done is just double or triple spaced this so the student can roll it into the Braille writer and they can Braille write on the page. Or you can number the blanks and have the students write what word goes-- so the first blank is number 1, 2, 3, and then they write the words in Braille on a separate sheet.
What we want to do, though, is make sure the kids can read the passage back when they're done. And it's a little harder to do when they have it on a separate sheet. But you might have older students who that would work well with. Because then they can see-- well, that didn't really make sense. There's probably a better word that would fit in that blank.
So this is a very simple technique that you can use that you can make on your own. You can find passages of things that are interesting and motivating for students to read. And it will give you a lot of information about the students' reading processes, especially related to comprehension.
You may also have students switching to motivation at this point who are reluctant readers. And you can also do, informally, interviews and questionnaires with students to try to find what they-- especially for students, maybe, who are new to you-- what they know about reading. You can interview the child. You can interview the parents.
What does the student like to do at home? Does he pick up a book and read at home? What are some of his favorite activities? Does he have access to books that he can read independently at home? You can interview the classroom teachers. You can make your own, or you can find them online. And the example in your handout is one that I found online and I tweaked. And you can make a better one than this. But this is just an example of how simple you can make them.
There's 10 statements. And all the student has to do is mark yes or no. So reading is a good way to spend spare time, yes or no. Most books are too long or boring, yes or no. There should be more free reading at school, yes or no. So the student can do this on her own, or you can do it with her. But this is a fairly simple way of doing an interview or survey with a student just to get an idea about their interest in reading.
And beyond that, you can also do interest inventories. If you have the kind of student who-- I can never find a book that I like, I can never find an interesting book-- I take a book out, and it's not very interesting, especially if they're ordering a book, perhaps, from web Braille or in paper Braille, and maybe they're not familiar with the books. So you can develop questionnaires as well.
And again, you can find them online, or you can develop your own. And also in your handout is an example of something like that. And this might help you pinpoint students who are interested in certain genres. Sometimes kids aren't interested in story books. Maybe they're interested in reading other kinds of books.
So on this example, kids can mark the answer that applies to them. So I most like to read mysteries, humor, adventure, sports, fantasy, history, animals, space, biographies, science fiction, poetry, or something else that's not even on here-- car manuals, whatever it is that the student is interested in, books about snakes, whatever. I don't like to read, my favorite book, my favorite author-- and this can help you match a book to a student, especially a student who maybe, as I said, is a little bit reluctant to read or think there's nothing out there that is going to interest him or her.
From motivation and ways to get kids better, I want to talk a little bit about vocabulary as well, because that is one of the areas that we identified in the ABC Braille study as being a need for students. There are vocabulary-- I could talk all day about vocabulary. But I wanted to give you guys a simple assessment that you can use with students to gauge vocabulary knowledge. And this one is the vocabulary knowledge skill. And this is a self-report that you can use with students.
And they look at various vocabulary words, and they themselves can tell you, I don't remember having seen this word before, which is one point. I have seen this word, but I don't think I know what it means. I've seen it, and I think it means. I know this word, it means this, or the highest number of points is I can use this word in a sentence. And then ask them to not only give you a synonym, but also use it in a sentence.
And this gets at that idea of different ways of knowing words. Maybe you've sort of heard it, and you have a connotation about it's a negative word or it's a positive word. But this drills down and gets kids to really think about how well they know a word and at what level they know it. As I said, vocabulary is a big topic that we can talk about all day. But I wanted to give you something practical and easy that you can use.
I want to talk a little bit about writing. And there are several ways that you can think about writing for students. And one is simply journal. And you can have kids do a reading journal or a log. And perhaps they're just keeping track of the reading that they're doing and what books they've liked, what authors they've liked.
You can do a dialogue journal. Journals are also good sometimes in the mornings when kids come in, and there's not a lot of things going on. As the kids are getting ready for the day, sometimes teachers will give kids what they call a morning message for them to write about.
So it gives kids a chance to practice their writing. Skills, And if you're using a dialogue journal, then you can write back a couple of times a week, once a week, or whatever. I wrote something about sensitivities regarding journals. Because you want to make it clear, if you're using a journal with a student, that the dialogue journal-- what things you may need to share with others.
So as students get older, for example, they might want to write about things that are serious, like bullying, or somebody is picking on me on the bus, or something else that's going on, and you want to make sure that the student knows what is private, what is going to be shared. So you just want to be aware of that.
But if you just have a student even keeping a reading journal-- I read this book, and I enjoyed this book, or I didn't like this book, I thought it was stupid when this happened-- then that can also give you not only a chance to see how the student's writing skills are, but also their interest in books.
I mentioned periodic work samples because that's a great way to collect information about how the student is doing at the beginning of the year, maybe the middle of the year, and the end of the year that you can share with the IEP team, with parents and classroom teachers, and with next year's teacher.
But another way, and a way that I think is much more motivating for students, is for students to develop portfolios of their writing. We think of portfolios often with art students and students who are preparing to go to art school where they select things. Well, we can do a similar thing with portfolio assessments with students for their writing.
So it allows the student to reflect and show their own growth, monitor their own progress. And it's something that's great that kids can share themselves as well as what you can be bringing, maybe, to an IEP meeting, so thinking about that as that motivation for assessment as well. I'm going to talk next about informal reading inventories, because I think this is an assessment that is very helpful for teachers of visually impaired. Again, I could talk a lot more about IRIs.
And some of you may be familiar with them. If you're using the Koenig and Holbrook Learning Media Assessment book for that ongoing assessment piece talks about using informal reading inventories. And certainly, it's important for the LMA process. But it's also something we can do maybe at the beginning of the year and the end of the year to show student growth.
Basically, an informal reading inventory will have word lists by grades. It will have a pre-primer, primer, first, second, third, maybe up to eighth grade, maybe up to 12th grade, and then passages at different grade levels with comprehension questions. And then you also keep track of the student's oral reading fluency, look at miscues, which I'll talk about in a minute.
You can make your own, but there are a number that are commercially made as well that we can use. And it helps you find that student's independent reading level, instructional, and then what's just too hard. As I said earlier, we know there's a connection between the amount that students read and their outcomes later on, their progress that they make.
So it's helpful to know what the student's independent reading level is. And on this slide, I gave you some approximations, depending on what source you look at, that, generally speaking-- and passage at an independent level-- the student knows most of the words. They're not struggling to figure out the words, and their comprehension is quite high, 90% or above.
And instructional level-- the students may know 90% to 95% of the words, and their comprehension would be a little bit lower because you're using this for instruction. But it's helpful to know those levels so that we can match books so that kids can find books to read for fun and for pleasure, and so that also, we're focusing on the right instructional level for our students and not giving them something that's too frustrating.
Informal reading inventories are really helpful because they can give you some idea of how the students are reading, the processes that they're using, the strategies. Are they able to figure out words? Can they recognize words that are on their grade level? What's their reading rate, and how accurate are they as they read? Are they able to remember details and figure out instances from the passengers, and are they paying attention? Are they going back and correcting things that don't make sense?
So there are a number of commercially available informal reading inventories, and they're listed on your handout. The one that I put a star next to or a bold is the basic reading inventory by Jerry Johns. Because that is one that is available in Braille, and I'll bet a number of you have used it. You can get it from the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, tsbdi.edu.
It's part of their assessment kit. I think their assessment kit has the 10th edition of the Johns, and there's a new one that just came out. But basically, it's the same thing. There's TSBVI also sells it in large print. So when you order it from TSBVI, you get the Braille and the print. But it's the same sort of thing. They all are about the same. They have word lists. They have passages. And you use those to gain information about how students are reading.
So basically, you start with the word list of the students' approximate grade level, use those word lists to determine what passages to start on. You record the student while she's reading, and you time how long it takes her to read the passages. You mark the words that the student didn't read as were in the original text, which is what a miscue is. And then you check for comprehension.
So we talk about miscues rather than mistakes, because miscues is the term that was coined for where the student is saying a word that is not in the original text. So you're for substitutions, omissions, and other things. So on this slide, let me just show you-- this is not in your handout, so let me just quickly go over it.
You're looking for substitutions where the student says one word instead of another one, and so you just write that word over it. So if the word was commuter and the student said computer, you just write the word "computer" over that. If they make up a word, you put a little dollar sign in front of it showing that the student made up a word instead of putting in a word that was a real word.
And you do that so that it's easy to find when the student is putting in non-words when they're reading. If the student leaves out words as he's reading, you just circle the words that have been left out. If the student puts in words, you just put the little carat mark, the little bird beak that goes up, and write that word in.
And if the students says things in a different order, you just loop around the words that they say. And if the student goes back and repeats-- they maybe are reading part of the sentence, and then they go back and fix it-- then you mark those as well.
And if you're a teacher who is a Braille reader yourself-- I've had teachers who told me that they mark the miscues maybe with a piece of that tacky stuff or a Wikki Stix. Or they have the passages in Braille in their Braille note taker, and then they put a symbol in front of the words that the students seem to be having difficulties with. And then you go back and code them.
And the reason you code them is just because you want to reconstruct, have the student read the text in a consistent way so you can see if the student-- if there's patterns to those. Remember that some of the things that students may misread won't look like print miscues. For example, the word is mop, and the student reads it as shop. The classroom teacher won't understand, probably, if the teacher doesn't know Braille, why a student would make that sort of error-- because of the reversal.
If the word is "hen" and the student says "he," the classroom teacher might think, oh, well, he just left off the last letter, not realizing that actually it was dropped contraction. So that's the other important reason why, as TVIs, we need to be looking at how our students are reading. Because it may not be obvious to the classroom teacher when students are making miscues like this that don't look the same in print, but they have a similarity in Braille.
Because after the student reads the passage, you're going to look at the words that the student missed, that the student was not accurate in reading. And did those miscues change the meaning of what he was reading? That's important to know. If a student made a miscue that doesn't really sound like language-- if it's lots of made-up words, the ones with the dollar signs in front, that gives you a clue. Or if they look similar-- and remember that in Braille, it may not look the same as print. But we as TVIs can pick out that similarity.
We want kids to go back and self-correct. So if they self-correct, that means it's not a significant miscue, because they went back and fixed it. But if they keep going on and they don't realize that they've made that error-- if they make up words or if you have to tell the word, then that might be a clue that the passages are getting too hard. And each of the informal reading inventories will give you a little scale on each page of what is independent level, instructional level, and frustration level.
We also can look at how many words per minute the student is reading and also look at comprehension. Because that's one of the main things, is was the student able to understand the passage as well-- not just call up the words accurately and fast, but also, were they able to understand.
Many of the inventories will have a retelling rubric. Can this student tell you who was the character, where it took place, what started at the beginning, what happened at the ending? And many of them also have comprehension questions as well.
So when you're doing your reading assessments, make sure that you're involving others in the process, that you're keeping accurate and detailed notes, and that you encourage the student to be involved, to get multiple measures, and to keep really good records for ourselves, for our students and their progress, so that it's not just a guess. Yes, the student is doing fine, I guess.
Make sure you're getting good assessments on all these literacy processes, especially focusing on vocabulary, reading-connected texts. Are they on grade level? Focus on writing.
And I just want to close with this quote about in the context of the assessment, inquiry is the process of asking questions, looking beneath and beyond the surface of the scores and evidence, and looking at yourself as a teacher, as a learner, and the student as well. Its essence is curiosity and openness to possibilities as well as the ability to be deliberate in searching for understanding.
So that was my quick fly-through, some literacy assessment that we can use as teachers. And I'm going to pause. I think we have a couple of minutes for questions if there are any. Or again, please feel free to just contact me directly through email, literacy2@mindspring.com.
Thanks so much. We do have some. This is Robin. We do have some questions coming in while they take a second to type them. I just want to thank you for giving us so much to really reflect on.
Christie asks how do you determine what vocabulary words you should use for the vocabulary and knowledge scale
Yeah. I love to talk about vocabulary, and I wish that I had more time to talk about it. There's a fantastic text, a very, very teacher-friendly book that I highly recommend called Bringing Words to Life. Beck is the first author, B-E-C-K, Isabelle Beck. And there's two other authors as well. And they talk about how to look at vocabulary in tiers-- tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3.
And briefly, the words that they say to focus on are words that are useful, that kids are going to see in lots of other contexts, words that show up often in writing but not so much in spoken-- for example, replied. A lot of stories will say, he replied. Well, when we're talking to each other, we don't tend to use that word. But it's a word that's found often in text.
And so that's another thing. So focus on words that kids are going to see over and over again that aren't in their spoken vocabulary, but once they understand what the words means, they can start using it. Commotion. Because there's thousands of words, so we really want to focus on words that kids are going to see again and again and that will enrich their vocabulary, both written and spoken.
That's a great example, because I remember very well learning a lot of those kinds of words from children's books, particularly verbs for speaking-- retorted, and people were always flouncing out of rooms. So you're right. There are a lot of words that you'll see that the child will encounter that maybe they don't hear ever spoken around them.
And if you think about students who are visually impaired who may not be able to appreciate the pictures or body language-- so understanding the difference between a shrug and a grimace and some of those things are going to be important for kids to understand so that they can comprehend the text.
Well, thanks so much, and thanks for providing your email address. It's really generous. Those of you who do have questions later after you've had a chance to reflect on the material that was presented today, and you want to follow up, that information is in the slide. And as I mentioned at the top of the call, this webinar is being recorded and will be available on our website tomorrow as well as downloadables of the slides that you saw today.
Our next presentation is in the middle of September. I believe it's September 18th. And you'll see more information.