What counts in reading and writing assessment? How do we align our teaching and our assessment? What is valued? Are all students included? How much time is taken? How do we use the information we collect to inform our teaching? AFL counts!

1. Examining Performance Based
Assessment and the Redesigned Language
Arts Curriculum K-7
Sept 28, 2017 4-6
Burnaby
• www.slideshare.net/fayebrownlie/burnabyassessment.sept2017

2. • Assessment is value driven.
• The assessment you choose must reflect what you value.
• So what do you value in reading and writing? What does your curriculum
value?

3. Purpose
• Why are you choosing this particular assessment?
• What will you do with the information?

4. Assessment of Learning
• Purpose: reporting out, measuring
• Timing: at the end
• Form: marks, percentages, letter grades
• Audience: parents and public

5. Assessment for learning
• Purpose: guide instruction, improve learning
• Timing: minute by minute, day by day
• Form: descriptive feedback
• Audience: learner and teacher

6. • Assessment should allow students to exhibit their strengths.
• Students should know the purpose of the assessment.
• Assessments should mirror the best of what we know about teaching
reading.
• More time should be spent on formative assessment than on summative
assessment.

7. Formative Assessment
• Information gained from an assessment should be used to influence
instruction – or the assessment is not worth doing.
• Assessments should not be too time-consuming as we need to get on with
the teaching.
• Feedback is the heart of assessment –
• Feedback from the student to the teacher
• Feedback from the teacher to the student.

8. • Questions that guide assessment:
• What’s working?
• What’s not?
• What’s next?

10. No plan, no point

11. The teeter totter
kids
kids curriculum

12. Who are my learners?

13. Reading Assessment
• The goal of teaching reading is to create readers who read with
understanding and who choose to read.
• The goal of a formative reading assessment is to determine the strengths and
areas to strengthen of a student’s reading with understanding.

14. • The skills required for fluency and effective decoding are important as
building blocks to understanding, not as independent aspects of reading.
• Background knowledge affects understanding tremendously.
• When assessing fluency, students should have had an opportunity to practice
first.

15. IRI: Johns
• Informal Reading Assessment
• 1:1
• Words Lists and Graded 100 word passages
• Independent, Instructional, Frustration reading levels
• Retelling and subsequent questions

16. Performance-Based Assessments
• Instructionally based
• Qualitative
• Interactive component
• Attempt to mirror ‘best practice’ in reading – i.e., including reasoning and open-ended response
• Not timed
• Require teacher judgment
• Performance measured against a rubric
• Provide evidence for what students can and cannot do

17. Assessment FOR Learning
PBA: performance-based assessment
• Descriptive scoring
• Coding in teams
• Class/grade profile of strengths and areas of need
• Action plans developed - what’s next?
• Individual students identified for further assessment

18. EPRA, grade 1

20. A Way in…..GET COMFY with the Performance Standards

27. Benchmarks: Fountas & Pinnell
• Measure accuracy, fluency, comprehension, independent reading level,
instructional reading level
• 1:1 conference
• Goal: instructional and independent reading level

28. Some points to consider:
• It is not the accuracy that is so important it is what you notice in terms of reading behaviour
so you can use this information to teach with.
• M – meaning
• Did that make sense?
• S – sound, syntax
• Did that sound right?
• V – visual
• Did that look right?

29. • Comprehension conversation
• 3 levels of questions
• Within the text
• Beyond the text
• About the text
Are these levels of questions reflected in your on-going
reading with the students?

30. Support for Vulnerable Students
• Good classroom teaching
• Daily 1:1 or small group teaching
• Word work
• Reading of just right or instructional text
• Writing about reading
Fountas & Pinnell

31. The Leveling Question
• It is detrimental to a student’s self-esteem and to their love of reading when
they are encouraged to measure their own progress by ‘moving up levels’.
• Fountas and Pinnell 2017
• Fountas and Pinnell created the F&P Text Level Gradient to be used as a
teacher’s tool for assessment and instruction. The levels aren’t meant to be
shared with children or parents.
• Fountas and Pinnell Literacy Post, Sept 29, 2016

32. • Telling students to choose by “level” is not an authentic way to select books
to read independently.
• They [families] may see the level as a very exact measurement, but students
don’t always read at a precise level.

33. • Listening to a child read should give you information to guide your
instruction.
• What patterns do you notice?
• What strengths/strategies does the reader demonstrate?
• Is the reader self-monitoring?
• Is the reader creating meaning?

34. • How often do you measure everyone with their levels? How is this
information used?

35. • How often do you measure everyone with their levels? How is this
information used?
• Summative, reporting out, tracking overall changes – once a year is sufficient
• What strengths does the group of readers demonstrate?
• What needs to be the next focus?

36. Reading Conferences

37. Reading Conferences
• Students share their
learning through
conversations.
• Students choose their own
book.
• Students are able to set
goals for future learning.
• We can see what strategies
students are using during
reading.

40. This enables us to show not only their reading strategies and
comprehension, but also their thinking about their reading and
how they see themselves as readers.
It gives us a sneak peek into their thinking about themselves,
their interests and their lives through the connections they
make.
Kirsten Brolin
Grade One teacher

41. Some Best Practices in Reading
• Choice
• Volume
• Read aloud
• Student eyes on text
• Thinking strategies
• Modeling thinking
• Encouraging student talk about texts
• Skills – phonics, fluency, sight words – are not ends in themselves
• Responsive, responsible, compassionate reading

42. Some NOT best practices in literacy
-no research support for decades!
-over-used, under-supported!
• Teaching grammar in isolation
• Friday spelling lists
• Assigning topics in writing, with no 1:1 no conferencing, just collecting the work
• Too much teacher-talk
• Fill in the blanks, MC, closed thinking exercises

43. Core Competencies
• Communication
• Thinking
• Creative
• Critical
• Personal
• Positive personal & cultural identity
• Personal awareness & responsibility
• Social responsibility

44. Essential Conditions that Support Student Self-
Assessments – Kelli Vogstad
• Caring Relationships
• Process-Oriented Engagement
• The Language of Reflection
• kellivogstad.com/2017/04/22/core-competencies-its-not-about-the-checklist

47. foxyandfriendsbooks.ca
• $7/title
• $40 for a set of 6