Assessing Students' Reading Abilities, Needs, Attitudes, and Interests in the Content Classroom

Chapter Six is entitled "Assessing Students' Reading Abilities, Needs, Attitudes, and Interests in the Content Classroom." This chapter was very interesting and discussed the different kids of assessment, as well as their implications, in the classroom. Dornan, Rosen, and Wilson suggest using a variety of methods to gather data about their students' reading comprehension and learning. Some of these suggestions include: observation, checklists, surveys, tests, conferences, written responses, interviews, and formal test results. I agree that it is important to have many different ways to "test" students. Not everyone excels at "normal" testing due to anxiety associated with tests. It is important to have various ways to evaluate students.

There are basically three purposes for assessing students: 1) program evaluation, 2) student evaluation, 3) instructional planning. Most school districts rely on standardized tests to evaluate the effectiveness of district or state programs. Standardized tests are known as formal assessments. Test results can identify strengths and weaknesses in instructional programs. They have been criticized in the past for perpetuating the existing socioeconomic class systems in America. They unfairly penalize non-mainstream students and the poor, who regularly score lower than middle-class white students, who usually make up the "norming group."

I remember hearing about a question on a formal assessment, which gave a jumbled up word that the students were supposed to decode. The letters of the word were: O T C A. The "correct" answer was supposed to be "coat", although many students wrote "taco" instead. This shows how these tests do not account for multicultural backgrounds.

Standardized tests may be easy to use, easy for teachers, and give the schools a general idea of how their students compare to other groups of students; however, they must be used and interpreted cautiously. There are numerous problems with standardized tests. First of all, reading tests are not based on our current understanding of how readers use language and make meaning, but instead on a series of short isolated skills that distort the reading process. They have inappropriate norms, are ambiguous, irrelevant, poorly written, and have purposely hard questions. Standardized tests are designed so that everyone but the weakest students get some items right, everyone but the best students get some wrong, and everyone else fall somewhere in the middle.

Because every classroom has a wide spectrum of students with  multiple intelligences, interests, background knowledge, learning styles, and personal attitudes it is important to use informal assessment measures. One teacher, in this book, had a suggestion of having each student write a subject-specific autobiography at the beginning of the school year of his/her feeling about the subject. It is a great way to see what the student likes, dislikes, and already knows about the subject before the semester begins.

According to "Best Practice" (1993), Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde, across subject areas it is important to: provide assessments that are formative, not summative, descriptive or narrative, not scored or numerical, student centered, approached from different angles, and part of everyday instruction. It is also very important for teachers to observe students and make assessments of their progress based on informal evaluations.