S4.2 Using Assessments to Set Goals

Assessments That Lead to Informed Teaching  

Open your copy of Words Their Way by Bear and colleagues (2016) and read the initial sections of chapter two "Getting Started: The Assessment of Orthographic Knowledge” (pp. 23-47). The authors discuss the rich observational data that can be collected just by watching children read and write for a variety of purposes throughout a given day. Think about the nature of your observations as you look at what students do. Are you looking solely to see if their reading and spelling are accurate, or are you looking to see what their reading and writing reveals about what they know and what they need to learn? One goal of the readings and activities for this session is to help you use informed observation and appropriate assessment to determine where your students fall on the developmental stages of reading and spelling. This information will, in turn, help you plan for instruction that addresses where they currently are and the direction in which they should be heading.

By teaching to the curriculum and following the information and procedures explained in “Getting Started: The Assessment of Orthographic Knowledge”, we may address the needs of the class in general as well as the needs of individual learners. Informed teaching means using observation and assessment data to make instructional decisions for individual students or groups of students. Implementing a program that is responsive to the individual needs of students can be time-consuming.

Discussion: Assessing and Planning Time

Engage in an online discussion about this issue by responding to the following questions. This discussion assignment will continue as you complete your reading of the chapter “Getting Started: The Assessment of Orthographic Knowledge” by Bear and colleagues (2016).

Refer to the discussion rubric to review some expectations for participating in online discussions in this course.

Using Assessment to Focus Instruction  

Continue to read the remainder of the chapter “Getting Started: The Assessment of Orthographic Knowledge” (pp. 23-47) by Bear and colleagues (2016). As you read, notice the feature inventories that highlight the characteristics of the Letter Name – Alphabetic stage, the Within Word Pattern stage, the Syllable and Affixes stage, and the Derivational Relations stage. The feature inventories provide information about the aspects of word study that need to be strengthened in order to move the student into the next stage of spelling development. To strengthen your skill of using assessment results to begin to plan instruction, complete the "Sample Practice" in Words Their Way, pp. 33 and 34. This activity is, indeed, practice and will not be graded. After you complete the practice assignment, check your answers with the "Results" provided at the bottom of page 34. 

Discussion: Assessing with Informed Observation and Feature Analysis

Now that you have completed the reading on assessment and have had some practice using assessment results to begin to plan for instruction, return to the discussion board to address the following questions: