November 18 Blog Post: Assessment

Assessment is very important in helping teachers help students achieve their highest learning ability. Every student learns differently and when it comes to teaching it is up to the teacher to understand the best way to teach to tend to every students need. There are also many circumstances where students may achieve different levels at different times. Assessment makes it possible to help challenge the faster learning children and help the teacher to know to pay more attention to the slower learning student. When observing a first grade class room in my Ed 100 class, the teacher used many assessments to know what levels each of her students were on. She used the pre- testing and post testing method. She would pretest to know what level of book each of her students would read for that week, and then as they did their weekly exercises, she would test them at the end of the week. She grouped the slower learning students together and allowed them to test with her verbally while the other more progressed students tested by themselves. She grouped in two groups rather than the three stated in Rubin's article- independent, instructional, and frustration. Although this method seemed to help the students' grades, it did not necessarily work areas that the students may be struggling at to help their reading improvement. It did not break down each category of reading like explained in Rubin's article, so the students did not know what they needed improvement in or get the practice that they needed to make that improvement. Like explained in Organizing and Evaluating Results From Multiple Reading Assessments, it's important to know the missing skills and ways to improve skills in reading to really become a good reader. The cloze test, for example, is a good way to improved vocabulary and comprehension, since the student has to know what words go in what order of a passage. Vocabulary and comprehension are two very vital skills to understand syntax and semantics, according to Rubin. The Informal Reading Inventories are important in step by step comprehension of the story. Although this may be an achievable task for student's they still may not understand what they are reading. It is important for the assessments to have more retelling and open questioning formats, like it says, so that the student isn't just able to match words in the questions to words that they see in the book read. The last mentioned, running records, is a good tool for keeping track of student's progress. It is a good way to not only test comprehension, but reading ability. Which assessment do you believe is most important?

Teachers are the most important person in recognizing a student's leaning ability and teaching based on that ability. It's up to teacher's to test each and every skill to really understand a student's reading ability. Based on Rubin's article, it is important to help improved pay attention to each and every ability to increase the less achieve skills and not just assume that if a student is lacking in one category he or she may not be exceeding in another.