It's that time of year! I love the beginning of a school year, a fresh start, and a chance to get to know a new and wonderful group of students. The beginning of the year for me brings assessments and data. Lots of data. This kick starts my year of intentional, targeted teaching so that my students receive the exact instruction that they need. I get weirdly excited about pouring over the data I collect from my reading assessments. It's like gathering pieces of a puzzle for each student and then putting the puzzle together. Once the puzzle is complete, I have a complete picture of the next steps we need to take in order for that child to have a successful and engaging academic year!
As an educator, one of my most important responsibilities is to ensure that all of my students become proficient readers. It's not always an easy task, especially when you begin the year with a class full of students reading several years below grade level (I know this reality well). But I firmly believe that with the right approach, using a structured literacy framework, we can make a significant difference in every child's reading abilities. Which, I hope, will ultimately lead each child towards living a fulfilling, choice-filled life!
So, today in this post I am going to take you through the first steps that I take when beginning my small group reading interventions using a structured literacy approach.
Assessing Student Reading Abilities for a Structured Literacy Approach in the Literacy Classroom
It would be fruitless to dive into your structured literacy reading lessons and small groups without first assessing your students.
There are many programs available now that will do these assessments for you, such as I-Ready and Lexia Core 5. These programs provide excellent information for teachers, but no online program can replace the knowledge and insight we get from taking some time to individually assess and read with each student.
I know that individually assessing every student is time consuming (believe me, I know, thus far my smallest class has been 26 and my largest 33 students), but it is worth the Herculean effort that it takes to have students independently engaged in meaningful work while you assess each child.
These assessments are essential because they allow me to identify where each student stands with information that an online report alone could never provide, and, more importantly, it shows me how best to support their unique needs. The areas that I am assessing are decoding and encoding skills (phonics and phonemic awareness), fluency, comprehension, and written expression (writing mechanics, syntax, grammar, etc.). To sum it up, I am assessing the key elements of the structured literacy framework because that is the framework that yields the greatest student results.
So, without further ado, here are the assessments that I begin the year with.
Reading Baseline Assessments
1) Passage & Questions (Assessing Word Accuracy, Fluency, Comprehension, and Written Expression)
I start by having each student read aloud a passage or story. This alone provides so much information. I set a timer as the child reads, noting both their fluency and prosody (reading with expression).
Additionally, I continue to mark their passages as if I'm conducting the 3 cuing system running records from days before structured literacy and science of reading became well known and widely practiced. Yikes! Why would I still note the 3 cuing system?! Well, even though I don't use that system to teach decoding (because it doesn't teach decoding, it reinforces guessing...), it does provide meaningful information about what the child is relying on to read the text.
Many children without a strong phonological awareness and phonics foundation rely on the meaning, syntax, or visual cues of a text to support their reading. I want to note what they are relying on more so I know how to best support them later. Are they making up words based on what would make sense in the text, with no regard to the letters on the page? That's important to note! I will then teach them to carefully attend to the letters on the page, while complimenting them on their ability to focus on the meaning of the story.
One way to help speed up your assessments is to have the student read enough of the text aloud to give you an idea of their fluency, word accuracy, and prosody, and then have them finish the text silently at their desk. While they continue to read silently, you can begin the next student's assessment.
After the student has finished the reading selection, I have 1-2 written comprehension questions for them to answer at their seat (again allowing me time to begin other children's assessments). The written comprehension questions give me all sorts of information beyond comprehension--syntactical information such as, do my students understand the mechanics of language, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc. Do they answer in complete sentences? Do they provide supportive evidence? And of course, how well do they understand the text?
I then bring the student back to my table where I ask them a few questions about the text and we have an oral discussion. I typically open the conversation with something generic like, "Tell me about the text." Some students will provide an in depth summary and analysis on their own with this prompt. Others need additional prompting. So, I have a few prepared prompts to use to gauge a child's understanding.
At the end of this section of the assessment, I have noted their word accuracy, fluency, prosody, and comprehension. So much valuable information to drive my instruction!
A note: when I first started teaching we were required to use the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System to level every child. Now that did take too long! Moving up and down, assessing over and over, until you find their "just right level"...deep sigh. These days, I choose one text to use with my students. It takes much less time, while still providing me with plenty of individual data to help me tailor my structured literacy lessons and interventions.
2) Nonsense Words (Isolating Decoding Skills)
Now this assessment is important, even for students who have excellent word accuracy during the reading passage. I will never forget a fourth grade student I worked with in another teacher's room. This teacher was at a total loss for where her student's comprehension was breaking down. According to the teacher, when she read aloud, she had decent fluency and her word accuracy was good enough.
But as the texts of fourth grade got increasingly difficult and technical, this child could not keep up. She was bright and knowledgeable so the teacher felt her background knowledge shouldn't be the issue holding her back. And she was right! In fact, the background knowledge was what was keeping her close to grade level. The problem was though, in fourth grade, new topics are introduced.
Students begin interacting with more historical and scientific texts, often about concepts they haven't previously encountered. This child was now having to read to learn and couldn't rely on her prior knowledge to do that.
So then where was the break down? It was in fact decoding! Even though her word accuracy appeared fine on running records. She was paying attention to the meaning of the text and had enough knowledge on the subjects in the benchmarks assessment books that she could fill in the words that she couldn't decode accurately. But when you removed context and provided her with a list of isolated words and nonsense words, she could barely read. She needed intensive phonics interventions so that she could engage with new ideas and begin her reading to learn journey. (And of course the structured literacy approach was the perfect approach for her remediation.)
For this assessment, students are provided with a list of decodable nonsense words. I set a timer and they read through the list of words. As they read, I note the sounds and words that they do not know. This helps me determine where their phonics gaps are, if any. It also helps me determine where to start them on the Orton Gillingham based scope and sequence for their structured literacy instruction. If their decoding skills are lagging, I know that targeted interventions using a structured literacy approach are needed to prepare them for the demands of technical texts in higher grades.
3) Spelling Assessment (Phonemic Awareness and Sound Pattern Recognition)
To further gauge students' phonemic awareness and sound pattern recognition, I administer a spelling assessment that covers the sounds patterns that they should know at their grade level. This assessment also helps identify the specific areas where students may need additional support.
4) Teacher's Read Aloud Passage (Assessing Listening Comprehension)
For students who struggled with the first reading comprehension assessment described above, I add another layer to their assessment: listening comprehension. I read a new text aloud to them and then we have a comprehension discussion, using prompts similar to that from the initial assessment. Over and over I have had students who struggle to comprehend independently read texts, but are then surprisingly insightful when a text is read aloud to them. This is important information! It shows that the break down is not their understanding of a text or their vocabulary, but their ability to actually read the text--perhaps they are working so hard to decode the text or to read fluently that they do not have the mental bandwidth to think about the content of the text. This information, combined with the data from the other assessments, provides me with a clear picture for where my instruction needs to go.
5) Morphological Awareness
This final element of structured literacy can be assessed if you'd like. I, however, typically do not assess my students morphological awareness and this is because most of my students have not received systematic, explicit instruction in this area in prior grades, so I always expect to start at the beginning of my curriculum. The program that my school uses peppers morphology instruction throughout the units of reading instruction, but it is neither systematic nor explicit, and therefore it is fairly ineffective.
Next Steps: Analyzing the Data and Forming Groups
Now that we have all of this valuable information, it's time to analyze the data. Stay tuned for the next post where I explain how I analyze the data and form my reading groups!
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