Final post for the semester

Use this week’s blog to reflect about your understandings of literacy assessments. As you move forward in your teaching career, what do you plan to use to assess or evaluate a student in reading and writing? How will you collect and use what you have assembled? How confident do you feel in giving and interpreting literacy assessments? Were you able to use the assessments to plan for instruction? If so, how? What lingering questions do you still have about assessments?

I would have to say that I really do have a much greater understanding now of literacy assessments and their value for evaluating students and my own instruction. I have always been retlatively comfortable administering running records, spelling tests, and variations of the NWREL writing continuum, but I did not have an appreciation for either the variety of assessments available, or their utility and effectiveness in planning instruction. I will continue to use basic running records to assess my student's reading levels for grouping purposes, but I would now feel comfortable adding comprehension retelling and WPM measures. I also think that I could learn much more about all my student's literacy levels by giving a combination of phonologcal/phonemic awareness, and phonics/alphabetic principle assessments. Before taking this class, I did not know that teachers could learn so much from these assessments, instead thinking thast these types of tests would only be given in special circumstances or by specialists like SLP's. I have not yet been able to use the assessments I gathered from my case study to recommend specific instruction for my subject, but I do plan on giving his teacher a copy of my work. I hope she will be able to use my suggestions for planning, to help him through the rest of the year. As to lingering questions about literacy assessments, I would only ask how to best organize and draw upon all that we have been given. I am sure that with some trial and error I will be able to determine which tests are going to be the most useful for my practice.

Case Study Progress

To be perfectly honest, I took the news that our case studies could be turned in a week later as some sort of small miracle. There is just so much data and information to sort through in order to make any sense of my student, in terms of his literacy, that I was worried I would not be able to do it in time. Matthew has been absent for the last few days, and I still have two assessments to administer. Hopefully the extra time will allow me to get everything done and adequately interpret all my data.

I have recently gotten some clinical information that may or may not clear up some questions about my student. He clearly has language processing difficultios of some sort, but it seems that they are definitely not physical. His hearing has been professionally tested and is functioning normally, and a speech/language specialist has evaluated him and confirmed that he has no apparent physical problems that would affect his speech. This later fact is somewhat surprising to me, given that he has complained about mouth pain, cannot pronounce certain sounds well, and has occasionally stuttered. This information is raising more questions than it is answering, but is also giving me some very interesting issues to speculate on.

I am anxious to get my running record and reading comprehension assessment done as soon as possible, since I believe these will give me great insight into Matthew's strengths and challenges. I don't feel like I have a complete picture of him yet without these pieces. Hopefully I will get them done tomorrow and will be able to move on to interpreting the information. Luckily, I did get to examine these two assessments last week as administerd by another student teacher in our class. Her first grade student actually seemed very similar in development to Matthew. I am confident that I will soon have enough information to put together an interesting case study of a fascinating child.