Literacy Assessments

I feel relatively comfortable giving various assessments in literacy to my students. It helps that I have a few years experience in the classroom as an assistant teacher in a private school, because assessments were one of the time consuming chores that my head teacher liked to pas off to me. I find it interesting that he must not have felt they were terribly important, given that I was largely in charge of performing the assessments (mostly running records and spelling lists), grading them, and recording the results. In the future, I plan on using assessments more often and more effectively in my classroom. It seems that many teachers think of them as a chore that has to be gotten over with, rathe than a useful tool for informing instruction. I hope I don't fall into that mindset, because I can see their value clearly. Interpreting results of these assessments is something that I am less confident in. I think I will need lots of time and practice in order to confidently gauge children's aptititude and learning levels using the different assessments. There are just too many variables to consider when making assumptions based on these results. I think that is why a range of assessments are necessary in evaluating each student. One result can be very misleading. For example, my case study student Matthew is showing a wide range of results in his assessments, which I believe relate more to his attitude than his aptitude. I had a very difficult time getting answers from him on the personal interview, because he wasn't interested, and he struggled with the Bryant Pseudoword, because he thought it was silly. He wasn't able to complete the Z test, either, because he got so frustrated. I have several assesments left to complete with him, and need to find a way to make them more interesting and engaging, in order to get any useful results to interpret. Basically, I am finding that the engaging part of this task is much more difficult than the administering or interpreting of results. I know there is a wealth of information to be gotten from Matthew, I just need to figure out how to get it out of him.