EP260 - Transform Your Literacy Program with Effective Assessment Strategies

What if you had the toolkit to boost your students' literacy levels? What if you could tailor your teaching styles to meet the individual needs of your learners? Welcome to a powerful episode that unravels the intricacies of incorporating assessments into your literacy program. We strip down the importance of diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments, helping you understand your students' starting point, observe their progress, and gain a comprehensive view of their proficiency levels. 

You'll discover how tools like Exocard's, guided reading, and spelling assessments can help you identify strengths and weaknesses in your students' learning process. We go further to discuss the value of literacy trackers and formative assessments, and how informal writing assessments can offer valuable insights into your students' writing skills. Discover how summative assessments can showcase overall proficiency and growth, and how encouraging students to select their work for assessment can fuel reflection and learning. So, join us for a deep dive into the world of assessments, and gain practical insights on how to use these tools to enhance your students' literacy skills.

Remember to Subscribe for more insights on how to navigate the complexities of teaching with efficiency and impact. Share your experiences and strategies in the comments to join the conversation with fellow educators.

To find our highly effective, time-saving resources

Checkout our Madly Learning Store at www.madlylearning.com/store
Checkout our Teachers Pay Teachers store

Join our FREE Facebook community for teachers here: https://bit.ly/IYT-FB

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:26

Assessments are a crucial piece of understanding your students' progress and tailoring your teaching to their needs, so let's jump right into it. So there's three different types of assessments that we should be using inside our literacy program. These are diagnostic assessment, formative assessment and summative assessment. Now, diagnostic assessment is the information you collect at the beginning of learning. Think of it as the information you are gathering at the start of each term. It's going to help you understand where your students are starting from and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Next, we have formative assessment. Now this is the information that you collect each week as you cover different skills. It's about observing and recording students as they work in groups, collecting and marking work samples and using various tools like Exocard's, guided reading, conversations with the student and the teacher conferences to gather information about their learning progress. And finally, we have summative assessments, which you typically collect one-two times per term. Summative assessments give you an overall picture of how students are applying the skills you've covered throughout the term. Some of these could be projects that you do at the end of a unit of study or even tests. Now let's dive deeper into diagnostic assessments.

Speaker 1: 1:35

In recent years, if we've transitioned from balanced literacies to a structured literacy. The types of diagnostic assessments that we have used have evolved. While standardized reading assessment tools like DRA or CASI are still valuable, especially for junior grade teachers, we do need to expand our diagnostic toolkit. For instance, when we're assessing oral language fluency, reading fluency and decoding skills, standardized assessments like DIBELs can be helpful. Dibels offers a quick assessment for oral language fluency and comprehension using things like a maze assessment, where students are choosing the correct missing word from a sentence. Another effective way to assess student fluency and decoding skills is by using a nonsense word list. These lists contain made-up words that test the student's ability to apply phonics knowledge and their ability to decode words. Hi, there are great screening tools to identify any issues with word memorization or whole-world reading, which is going to be a problem for some of our junior students if that is the way they figured out how to decode. It's a great way to highlight this as a red flag for students.

Speaker 1: 2:47

Spelling diagnostics are also important. Spelling assessments, like words their way, can be valuable even if you're not using the entire program. The diagnostic assessment within the programs like ignited spelling, can help identify students' word patterns and spelling skills. When it comes to assessing writing, it doesn't have to be overly formal. You can simply ask students to write a recount, a story or even a paragraph Throughout the term, assess the student's word choice, vocabulary, spelling, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation skills and conventions in their writing. These informal assessments can provide valuable insights into your student's writing skills. Me personally, I love using a writing feedback form that allows students to analyze their skills, as well as having a goal board posted for my students to begin to start evaluating their own skillset as writers.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Now let's talk about formative assessments in language arts. This is all about assessing students' progress as they learn. This is all about assessing students' progress as they learn. It happens regularly, often on a weekly basis, and involves various strategies that allow us to observe and record the learning of our students. Some of the ways to conduct formative assessment we can observe and record students as they work in groups. We can collect and mark work samples to help understand their skills and progress. We can use exit cards to quickly gauge their understanding of a lesson. We can ask them to engage in guided reading, conversations and observations and then record what we notice. We can conduct student-teacher conferences to have meaningful discussions about their learning, which is one of my favorites when it comes to working with students and their writing skills, we can also keep an eye on their work and other subjects, such as literacy. Skills often transfer into things like science and social studies.

Speaker 1: 4:44

It's essential to remember that formative assessment is not about assigning numerical grades that are going to end up on a report card. Instead, it's about really understanding whether students understand, apply and can explain the concepts that you've taught. By focusing on the minute details and evidence that they're learning, you can answer these crucial questions Can they do it, can they apply it and can they explain it? To help you track your students' progress effectively, consider using a literacy tracker. This tool simplifies the process of collecting and organizing evidence of skills. Now here's how it works. We're going to create a tracker for each week of the term. Then we're going to identify specific skills or areas for focus that we're going to use each week. We're going to use our observations, work samples and checklists to record the evidence of these skills throughout our class each week. Then we're going to assess students on the evidence we collect. So, essentially, when our formative assessment indicates that students are starting to understand a skill that we are teaching, then it is time to formally assess it. So, after we've gone through and modeled the skill. We've done it with students. We've asked them to do it with partners. We've asked them to try it on their own and then take it up and provide them feedback Along the way. We are noticing that their skill is growing. Once we are sure that students are ready to start doing it independently, then we can give students a chance, give them some feedback, as well as mark those and collect them and then reteach, reinforce and again assess again. By using this approach, you'll have a clear record of how your students are progressing over the term. It's a way to practically monitor their growth and identify areas where they may need additional support.

Speaker 1: 6:24

Finally, let's explore what summative assessment is. In literacy, summative assessment is a place to provide an overall view of students' proficiency levels, to determine whether they're ready to move on. They should be conducted one or two times per term. One approach is to take some of the formative assessments that you've conducted during the term and use them to inform your summative assessment. For example, you might select a reading response or writing task that represents the culmination of students' skills that they have been learning. This task can be more weighted heavily than others and can be a valuable summative assessment tool.

Speaker 1: 6:56

Additionally, you can periodically ask students to select a piece of their writing or their work from other subjects that they're particularly proud of. You can have them revise and refine it and then submit it for a final mark. This process not only provides a summative assessment, but also encourages students to reflect on their progress and learning. Incorporating exit cards or snapshots of student works from various weeks can also be part of their summative assessment strategy. The key here is to select assessments that showcase their overall proficiency, understanding and growth. And there you have it A comprehensive approach to assessing students in your literacy program. Remember, assessment is a dynamic process. It involves diagnostic, formative and summative assessment components. By utilizing variety of these tools and strategies, you can gain some really valuable insights into your students' progress and tailor your teaching to meet their individual needs.