A Kindergarten Comprehensive Literacy Assessment Plan

References

Overall, I hope for all students to become successful readers. This comprehensive literacy assessment plan will help me understand their needs, and will give me the information I need in order to develop and instruct meaningful lessons that will enhance learning,while adhering to the CCSS ("Maine Department," 2015).

In addition to the assessments that I have spoken about, in this presentation, Afflerbach states that we should also pay attention to the assessment of "the other" which is important to the outcome of reading success (Afflerbach, 2012). Some contributing factors of "the other" assessment are things such as the students' interests, attitude, and motivation toward reading. It is important to know our students and teach to their needs, using their interests to help motivate them.

This course has given me the insight I need to focus on meaningful assessments in the classroom. I have enjoyed the process and feel better organized, as a teacher.

A Comprehensive Literacy Assessment Plan

Here is an example of an end of unit comprehensive assessment taken from the Reading Street program (Pearson, 2016). This assessment assesses skills measured for the CCSS Literature expectations at the kindergarten level ("Maine Department," 2015). Students are expected to listen to the story and then answer the questions to measure general comprehension skills.

Comprehension

for

Summative Assessments

Why do we obtain evidence with summative assessments?

Comprehension is the ability to make meaning, requiring specific skills and strategies, vocabulary, background knowledge, and verbal reasoning.

Summative assessments are administered at the end of a unit, or at the end of another established time period. They are usually graded, or scored, to measure a student's performance on material already taught (Pearson, 2016). We obtain evidence with summative assessments to:

• report reading achievement
• document growth
• assign grades for progress reports, or report cards
• validate decisions about a student's achievement
• recommend a student for placement in a special program
• gauge the effectiveness of a program
• satisfy state and federal mandates
• inform parents, colleagues, and administration

Vocabulary

Kindergarten

Vocabulary is the body of words and their meaning that students must understand in order to comprehend text.

So which assessments do we use:

where?

when?

and why?

I assess comprehension through the Reading Street (Pearson, 2016), and DRA ("Developmental Reading, 2016) programs. The DRA is used more as a summative assessment, while the Reading Street assessments are more formative. However, there are some summative assessments that I use to assess at the end of a unit using Reading Street materials.

The more exposure students have to good vocabulary, the better they will be able to understand what they are reading. I assess vocabulary informally, but continuously. While using the Reading Street curriculum, as a foundation (Pearson, 2016), I introduce six new amazing words per week that we use and talk about in our classroom, and hopefully outside of the classroom. We use these words in songs, games, readings, play, conversations, etc. These are not to be confused with high frequency words. They are not meant for the students to be able to read or spell, but to increase their understanding of words. For example, this weeks words are: platypus, groceries, market, lost, found, plaid. Most of my students did not know what a platypus was before this week. Some of them didn't know what a market was. Only one of them knew what plaid was. Now they are all wearing plaid, and talking about it!

This is a formal assessment that should be completed four times a year, beginning with the benchmark assessment, and ending with the end of year assessment, monitoring progress in between. The assessment has several sections that should be administered individually, which makes administering and scoring quick and easy.

Phonemic awareness is the awareness of, and ability to manipulate the individual phonemes in spoken words. The Literacy Resources Phonemic Awareness Skills Assessment (Phonemic Awareness, 2016), assesses all areas of phonemic awareness such as:

• alphabet recognition (uppercase)
• alphabet recognition (lowercase)
• letter sound identification
• rhyme recognition
• onset fluency
• blending
• segmenting words
• identifying initial, medial and final sounds
• adding, deleting and substituting phonemes in words

Formative Assessments

Why do we monitor progress with formative assessments?

Phonemic Awareness

Formative assessments are used to gain frequent and timely feedback, for both the student and the teacher. They are given throughout the learning process (Pearson, 2016). They are used:

Timothy Rasinski states there are three dimensions to fluency: accuracy in word decoding, automatic processing, and prosodic reading (Rasinski, 2003). His fluency rubric measures expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace. Scores of 10 or more indicate the student is making sufficient progress, while scores under 10 indicate that the student will need more instruction in fluency. This rubric is much like the scale we use for the DRA ("Developmental Reading," 2016). This rubric can be used informally, while the DRA can be used formally.

• to diagnose children's strengths and weknesses
• to provide frequent, helpful, feedback to children and teachers
• to motivate the learner to increase effort as they experience success
• to build the learner's confidence
• to help the learner take responsibility for their own learning
• to communicate with parents, colleagues, and administration

Here is an example of the DIBELS (Learning, 2016) assessment I used for one of my students. Throughout this assessment I learned which sounds she already knew and which sounds she needs more instruction around. With this information I will be able to direct my lessons around these sounds.

Fluency is reading text with sufficient speed, accuracy, and expression to support comprehension.

Fluency

Phonics

Phonic is the study and use of sound and spelling correspondences and syllable patterns to help students read written words.

Assessments

What is a Comprehensive Literacy Assessment Plan?

Phonics and Phonemic awareness are closely connected. Phonics relies on the student's ability to understand phonemic awareness. Once the student understands that words are made up of phonemes, and can match the phoneme to the letter symbols, he, or she, can begin to blend those sounds together to help form words. Good phonics instruction will help connect the phonemes to written words. I believe the DIBELS (Learning, 2016) assessment will help me, at the kindergarten level, determine which sounds my students need to focus on in order to become fluent readers. This is a one minute assessment that will provide immediate results focusing on letter sounds and reading nonsense words. Once the student's have mastered letter sounds, they will begin to read the two to three letter nonsense words.

It's important to choose assessments that will be meaningful, and help guide instruction, in order to improve learning. There are different assessments for different needs. There must be a balance of informal assessments for learning, and formal assessments of learning. Both formative and summative measures should be used while aligning with CCSS ("Maine Department," 2015), and based on assessment purposes.

by Laurie Martin

UNE

EDU 741

A comprehensive literacy assessment plan is a group of assessment resources, which include all necessary elements required, to evaluate a student's ability to read and write. The National Reading Panel states that a good comprehensive literacy plan is made up of five components: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension (National Reading, 2000). Therefore a good comprehensive literacy assessment plan would assess these five areas in order to drive instruction. I intend to use assessments that include all five areas.