Assessment Resources

“There is now a strong body of theoretical and empirical work that suggests that integrating assessment with instruction may well have unprecedented power to increase student engagement and to improve learning outcomes.” (Wiliam, D., 2011, Studies in Educational Evaluation)

Assessment is a driving force for the decisions made each day by educators. It provides teachers with the informaiton they need to reflect on the effectiveness of their teaching as well as the learning of their students.

Assessment can be both formative and summative. Margaret Heritage shares her thinking on formative assessment in this way: "The purpose of formative assessment is to provide feedback to teachers and students during the course of learning about the gap between students' current and desired performance so that action can be taken to close the gap."

The following links provide a number of Summative and Formative Assessment Resources that Clarkston teachers will use to assess literacy learning and drive instruction. All of these tools are designed to help teachers create a story of the child's literacy learning, This story will result in a profile of each reader and writer in the classroom. Literacy profiles will currently be housed in the green literacy folder that is part of each learner's CYA file.:

Early Literacy Learning: Children enter school with knowledge of letters, sounds and the ways words work. Determining what our readers know about concepts of print, their phonemic awareness, their ability to hear and record sounds, as well as their knowledge of letter names and sounds will enable us to best plan for the way we will support a young child's literacy learning. The following early literacy assessments will help teachers know what their readers are attending to in print and what they still need to learn.

Concepts of Print:

Letter/Sound Identification:

High Frequency (Word Wall) Word Assessement

Benchmarks for Primary Assessments

The Phonemic Awareness and Hearing and Recording Sounds portions of the MLPP assessment will be administered to our Kindergarten and some first grade students. These MLPP assessments may be accessed here.

MLPP

Michigan Literacy Progress Profile

Reading Engagement Inventory: Children grow as readers when they spend time on text! Readers who are distracted or lack focus will not develop their reading skills at the same rate as readers who maintain their focus on the text they are reading. Use this assessment measure to determine whether or not your readers are immersed in their text.

Writing Engagement Inventory: Use this resource to determine whether or not your writers are engaged in their writing. Remember, writing fluency and the volume of writing matters!

Reading Interest Inventories: Every reader can be a highly engaged reader! If he or she is not, it is our responsibility to help that child discover a passion for the printed word. In order to do so, we need to know what interests our readers so that we can help them choose texts that will enable them to "fall in love" with reading. You can find samples of reading interest surveys here or, if you are on Pintrest, there are a multitude of Reading Surveys that can be accessed through this link. Please remember that the purpose of any Reading interest survey is to help you get to know the child so that you can help him or her find books that match his or her passions. K-2 teachers may want to obtain interest information by engagining in a conversation with a child, while upper elementary teachers may have children write their responses to the questions.

Reading Logs: Reading logs are an important tool to help children set goals for reading and keep track of their progress toward that goal. You can access logs for Clarkston by clicking on the links below:

Tally Reading Log for readers who are not yet reading chapter books (Levels E-I.
Traditional Reading Log for readers who are reading at Levels J and beyond). Some thoughts about the importance of Reading Logs from Lucy Calkins as well as additional Reading Logs shared by CCS 3-5 teachers can be accessed here.

TCRWP Running Records: Running Records provide us with valuable information about a child's reading. Documentation and analysis of a running record lets us see where a child's ability to decode unfamiliar words, breaks down. When we analyze the errors a child makes while reading, we can determine exactly what a child does when he or she encounters an unfamiliar word. Does the child use visual clues to try to figure out what the word is? Does he or she think about the structure of the phrase or sentence and consider how the word might sound in the context of the story? Or does the child think about meaning and substitute a word that makes sense in place of the difficult word. This error anaylsis then helps us formulate an instructional plan designed to grow the reader so that she or he can read books of increasing complexity. The conversation that we have with the child following the administration of the Running Records provides information that tells us how well the child has understood what he or she has just read. Taking meaning from the text is always our number one goal for the reader. Running records open the window into a child's comprehension of a text, and again help us plan for "next step" reading instruction.

Click on the link above to visit the Teachers College Reading Writing Project site where copies of TC running records and recording sheets can be downloaded. Texts that accompany Running Records for Levels A-Z+ are located in each building. Printed copies of the TCRWP RR Recording sheets, as well as published books for assessing levels A-K and print text for levels L-Z+ are also located in each of our elementary schools.

A link to Clarkston's Running Record texts and the form used to record student assessments and levels of growth can be accessed here.

The Continuum of Independent Reading Levels that is part of Clarkston's System of Assessment and Reporting and will be used by CCS teachers to indicate the growth of our readers along this progression of text complexity.

Word Study: Word study is an integral piece of balanced literacy. Children who are engaged in word study develop an understanding of how words work, enabling them to transfer their learning of phonics, spelling patterns and vocabulary to their daily reading and writing. Clarkston teachers use Words Their Way: Word Study in Action as the resource for word study learning. In addition to the examination of a learner's daily reading and writing, the Words Their Way Spelling Inventories serve as assessment tools designed to help determine the developmental spelling levels of students. Once the observational data as well as the inventory data is gathered , teachers have the tools needed to provide differentiated instruction based upon the learner's prior knowledge of letters, sounds, and spelling patterns. The following inventories, as well as general instructions for administrating the inventories and classroom composite forms, are available by clicking the following links:

Writing Pathways: This valuable resource will enable teachers and writers to identify strengths of a writer as well as areas for growth. On-demand assessments will be administered in the Fall to determine the internalized understandings that each learner brings to the new school year.

Click on the following links to access the on-demand prompts for each type of writing:

These samples of student writing will be examined by teachers, students and parents to determine a writer's strengths and needs for narrative, opinion/argument and information writing. Learning progressions, student exemplar pieces, annotated writing samples, and student checklists will provide the tools teachers and learners will need to set goals for writing growth as well as to determine end-of-year writing proficiency. Teachers can access all Writing Pathways Resources by going to this link or by going to the Heinemann link located on the inside cover of the Writing Pathways text that was purchased for all grade level teams as well special education teams. If you use the link on this site, the code to enter is: WPK8Res14. You will first need to register by indicating your email.

In keeping with our S.O.A.R. initiative, we have modified the Writing Pathways Rubrics so that teachers are able to score on-demand writing samples using the Beginning, Developing and Secure Feedback indicators. To access the rubrics for scoring Beginning of the Year Narrative Writing, End of Unit Narrative Writing, Information Writing, and Opinion Writing, click here! Please remember that when you indicate that a child is secure with any section of the rubric, you are acknowledging that the child has mastered each of the previous years' skills in that area. .

Clarkston Community Schools