Reading Assessments and a Key Question

I am thinking ahead to the beginning-of-year reading assessments that I will give my class (I will address writing assessments in a later post). It appears to me that the district reading assessment may provide only a general lexile score, and I will need more information than that to plan targeted instruction for specific groups of students. During my research career, I collected and created a variety of assessments, so I am better equipped in this regard than most teachers. For example, I will administer several standardized measures that are not commonly used in schools. These will give me information on where my students stand in comparison to large norming samples and, at the end of the school year, allow for careful analysis of my class's growth. Here are the specific measures that I am planning to administer:

1) Word Reading: 

•  A standardized measure of word reading
• An assessment of "advanced word reading" that I have created (inspired by the Walpole/McKenna Informal Decoding Inventory) that will provide data on students' ability to read specific types of 2-syllable and 3+ syllable words. If you are interested, here is a link to this assessment: Polysyllabic Word Reading Assessment. Here is a sample of the tested words:
  

2) Oral Reading Fluency: Dibels ORF

3) Vocabulary

• Gates-MacGinitie Vocabulary Test (standardized test)
• The Specific Vocabulary Knowledge Assessment (SVKA) that we created for our research on 4th-5th grade multifaceted vocabulary instruction. This is a test of a subset of the less familiar frequent words that were taught in the research instruction. Given the high numbers of emergent bilinguals in my class, I have combined the fourth- and fifth-grade SVKAs into a single test. If my students show need with regard to the 4th grade words, I will plan to teach both the fourth-grade and fifth-grade lessons. The test has shown relatively strong correlations to the Gates Vocab Test and thus could give teachers some insight into students' vocab knowledge. It is administered whole class, and if you give just the 4th grade words (1-25) or 5th grade words (26-50), it doesn't take long at all. For those interested, here is a link to the test: 4th-5th SVKA. Here is a snippet of this test:
  

• The Morphological Analysis Assessment that we created for the same research project. This test  assesses students’ ability to segment words into individual morphemes, match taught affixes and roots to their meanings, and select the best meanings for low frequency affixed words. It would be a good general pre/post test to see the effects of morpheme instruction. For those interested, here is a link to the test: MAA
• The Textual Analysis and Writing Vocabulary test that I created for our research on the informational text reading and response writing routine that we have researched for the last couple of years. This  test focuses on concept words that are specifically taught in our TAW lessons (e.g., ecosystem).
  

 4) Comprehension: Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension Test (standardized test)

I am eager to see the outcomes from these assessments. I predict, based on my emergent bilingual student population, that the vocabulary scores will be relatively low and thus that this will be (as it should for all students!) a serious focus of instruction. However, I am less certain about the students' foundational skills (word reading and text reading fluency) and just how much of an instructional emphasis I will place on them. By fifth grade, common wisdom suggests that many students will have solid foundational skills and thus will benefit from instruction focused primarily on language/text comprehension. However, based on some recent research findings on emergent bilinguals' word reading skills (Mancilla-Martinez, Hwang, & Oh, 2021) and the likelihood of learning loss during the pandemic years, I am not so sure about this. I look forward to answering the question about my students' levels of foundational skills in reading at the beginning of the year, as this will influence how much instructional time I will invest on these skills. 

In mid-August I will post about how the data I collect will inform my reading instruction for the first months of school, so come back for that discussion!

Thanks for reading! Patrick

 

A Hypothesis to Test about Highly Effective Reading Instruction

 Welcome to this first post on A Literacy Researcher Goes back to School! As you might guess, during 20+ years of reading and conducting research on elementary literacy instruction, I have developed many ideas about highly effective reading instruction. Here, I want to share the research-based hypothesis that will be the foundation of my fifth-grade reading instruction this year. 

Over the past decade, I have conducted research in a number of diverse school settings. However, the starting point for much of my work has been my wife's third-grade classroom. We referred to her class as LOLA, the Laboratory for Optimal Literacy Achievement, and used it to develop and pilot a number of instructional approaches. During the last two years, we switched from focusing on specific areas of literacy instruction - vocabulary, textual analysis, advanced word reading - to conducting a holistic case study of all aspects of her reading instruction. Our intent was to confirm and examine her students' accelerated growth in reading and to provide a detailed description and analysis of the classroom instruction that led to this growth. 

Assessment data from numerous measures demonstrated that her students made accelerated growth in all areas of reading. For example, the class began the year at the 30th percentile on the Gates-MacGinitie test of reading comprehension and ended the year at the 61st percentile. Further, analysis of student groups who began the year in the bottom quartile, middle quartiles, and top quartile on the Dibels test of Oral Reading Fluency revealed that each group showed accelerated growth in all areas of reading.

How, specifically, would I describe the instruction that produced these exceptional results? My analysis of my observational data led to the identification of the following 10 characteristics that captured the nature of Ann-Margaret's instruction:

1)    High degree of teacher-managed instruction featuring rich teacher-student interaction and scaffolding of tasks for lower-performing readers and writers

2)    Close linguistic study of words, including phonemes, phonics, syllabification, and morphemes

3)    High degree of oral text reading in assisted and partner structures.

4)    Reading of challenging texts in multiple genres including daily reading of informational texts

5)    Continual focus on vocabulary both in stand-alone instruction and during text reading, discussion, and writing

6)    Comprehension instruction focused on analytic (e.g., literary elements, key informational content, text structure) discussion and written response

7)    Use of small group instruction for in-class intervention in word and text reading

8)    Assigned independent reading within a motivating and accountable structure

9)    Daily instructed writing in response to text reading

10) Strong teacher encouragement of growth mindset with regard to performance in literacy

Taken together, these 10 characteristics constitute my current holistic hypothesis on the nature of instruction that leads to accelerated student achievement in reading. They are guiding my planning for reading instruction for my first year back in the classroom, and I will be examining, on a careful week-to-week basis, how they play out in practice in my fifth-grade class, where and how they may need revision for my diverse students, and the effects that they have on each student's growth in reading. I hope that you will tune in regularly to this blog for my ongoing analysis as I test this hypothesis and for descriptions of the practical structures, activities, and materials that I use to address these themes in daily instruction. 

Thanks for reading! Patrick