Assessing reading work is a multi-step process. The TCRWP offers a number of assessments to support you in this critical work. We offer assessments for Concepts of Print (for emergent readers), Letter/Sound Identification (recognition of letters and their corresponding sounds), High Frequency Words (recognition of words that appear frequently in the books students read), and Independent Reading Levels in Fiction and Nonfiction texts (assessing the level of text at which students read independently).
Click here for Reading Assessments
In 2006, the TCRWP drafted and piloted an assessment tool to better track student growth in narrative writing. We developed a continuum for assessing K-8 writing, and began describing the developmental pathways along which young writers tend to travel. We found that the process itself, and the resulting draft of a document, has been enormously helpful to teachers we work with in bringing more precision to the teaching of narrative writing. It offers not only benchmarks for student work, but a vision and a vocabulary for what the very next steps from those benchmarks might be, making differentiation of instruction much more realizable.
Click here for Writing Assessments
Understanding a student's spelling development involves more than noting whether a child has spelled a word correctly or incorrectly. An accurate picture comes rather from taking an inventory of the patterns of spelling that a student has control of and the ones with which the student struggles. In Words Their Way, Donald Bear offers three quick and simple tools for identifying these spelling patterns. Click on the link below for instructions and assessment tools for primary, elementary, and upper grade spelling inventories.
Click here for Spelling Assessments
There is no single pathway along which all students will progress. However, if we expect that children will begin Kindergarten as emergent readers who are working toward Level A books and that they will finish 8th grade reading Level Z books, we can imagine how they might develop during their reading journey. It is helpful to have benchmarks to guide our instruction and to determine when a student's progress is too slow for us to reasonably expect that child will finish 8th grade as a level Z reader. These benchmarks act as indicators for when a child requires additional intervention, which allows us to respond immediately to that child's needs. The TCRWP offers benchmarks for Independent Reading Level Progress, Oral Reading Progress and Primary Reading Progress (Concepts of Print, High Frequency Words, Letter ID, and Letter/Sound Identification).
Click here Benchmarks for Student Progress
The In-Book Assessment provides teachers with a method for assessing a students' reading level using their independent reading book.
Click here for the In-Book Assessment - May '09
In addition to assessing reading levels, teachers are often looking for tools to help with assessing the proficiency at which students are using their reading skills. These types of assessments can become the basis of both curriculum planning and planning individual conferences. We are offering a couple samples of how a comprehension proficiency assessment might go.
Click here for Abby Takes Her Shot - May '09
Click here for A Tough Day for Thomas - May '09
Click here for Student Examples of Envisionment -May '09
Click here for Student Examples of Prediction - May '09
We recommend that schools establish and implement policies so that each student in the school (grades 2-8) maintains a daily record of the books he or she reads in school and at home. These logs are not places for responses to reading, nor do students write book summaries in them. They are simply records of time spent reading and volume of reading accomplished. After a few weeks, we suggest you encourage students to study their own reading logs in order to articulate their reading habits. The logs provide an irreplaceable window into students' reading lives.
Click here for a sample Daily Reading Log - May '09
