Assessments to Inform Reading Instruction

Some tidbits

Dear Readers,

Happy Memorial Day Weekend. Many of you have been asking us to write a little bit about assessment in reading. So, here goes!

Best,

Lizzie and Marie

In the early grades, the ultimate responsibility of our reading instruction is to… help children learn to read and want to read. During these years, children’s language and listening comprehension are typically much higher than their foundational skills (note the word typically). For example, you can read a child who is four or five or six a rich chapter book and they can work to comprehend it alongside you—even though they couldn’t read the words on their own. One of our responsibilities, then, as teachers of early readers is to grow their foundational reading skills (ability to decode) to allow them to catch up to their language and listening comprehension. (While, of course, growing and supporting the latter, too.)

While our ultimate responsibility is that students learn to read books, it doesn’t mean that our only assessment can be listening to children read books. As we discuss each of the assessments below, we’ll look not only at what the assessment is and what it tells you, but also what it doesn’t tell you—which we think this is equally important to think about.

(P.S. Want to print the above quote? Here ya go. )

Letter-Sound Assessment

• What it is: Children are asked to look at letters, name the letter, and provide the sound the letter represents. (You probably know this one…)

• What it tells you:

  • Can a child identify the name of the letter?

  • Can a child make the sound of the letter?

  • How quickly can the child do this?

• What it doesn’t tell you: Other forms of letter knowledge. In addition to being able to name the letter and provide a sound, Heidi Mesmer says that a child who has alphabet knowledge can also:

  • Point to letters (locate them) when they are named by a teacher

  • Write letters to produce inventive spellings

  • Understand the alphabet principle (that the alphabet are symbols that put speech into a written mode)

  This assessment also doesn’t tell you:

  • A child’s ability to blend letter sounds together to read a word

Decoding Inventory

• What it is: Children are asked to look at words and decode (read) them--each list of words contains a specific phonics concept/or feature (ex. CVC, short vowel words with blends and digraphs, silent e, r-controlled vowels, vowel teams). 

• What it tells you:

  • What phonics concepts has the child mastered?

  • What phonics concepts need review?

  • What phonics concept can be taught next?

  • Can the child make the sounds in the word and blend them together?

• What it doesn’t tell you:

  • The child’s ability to spell the words

  • The child’s ability to use phonics concepts while reading continuous text (sentences or books)

Listening to children read books

• What it is: The teacher listens and observes the child while reading a book. This can be a running record, in which a record of accuracy, attempts and substitutions are kept. Nell Duke has developed the Listening to Reading/Watching While Writing Protocol. (Click here to find out more.)

• What it tells you:

  • What kinds of books might this child be able to decode independently?

  • What does the child do when they encounter difficulty in reading?

  • A bit about phonics usage (but not everything): If the child knows a phonics concept in isolation, are they able to apply it in continuous text? 

  • What particular words does the child get stuck on?

  • What reading behaviors (rereading, fixing up mistakes) does the child exhibit?

  • What understandings (both literal and inferential) does the child come to?

• What it doesn’t tell you:

  • A child’s mastery of phonics concepts (since some words may be supported through meaning and structure —a.ka. picture and sentence order.)

  • A child’s mastery of high frequency words (since some of these words are certainly supported by structure). Imagine the sentence “We are…” The child may read the word are, but they may be using sentence order/syntax to support their decoding.

  • A full picture of a child’s comprehension - David Kilpatrick talks about the challenge of measuring comprehension through a child’s independent reading of a text. For early readers, one of the reasons a child may not comprehend the text is that much of the effort put into the text is to decode the text, and little room is left for comprehension. Kilpatrick pushes us to ask: If this text was read aloud to the child, would they understand it? If the answer is yes, then the underlying issue is likely decoding.

  • An exact next step for a child - It’s important to look at this kind of assessment against other assessments—in particular, decoding inventories.

What Matters

What matters is that you think not only about what assessments matter and when to do these assessments, but also what you will do with them. 

Will you:

• Reflect on your teaching (methods and engagement)?

• Adjust curriculum (whole class)?

• Form goals for small group or individual instruction?

• Celebrate growth with students?

Keep In Touch!

Let us know what you are thinking and wondering by clicking here and filling out our survey.

Related Reading:

Transformative Assessment by W. James Popham (Book)

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande (Book)

Free or Very Low Cost Early Literacy Assessments compiled by Nell K. Duke, Julia B. Lindsey, and Erin M. Brown (Article)