Ch.7 O’Malley & Valdez

Content Area Assessment
For ELLs

Purpose: at least 3. To monitor progress, review growth, and determine instruction; reclassification; accountability= students have to meet the same standards as all others, and are thus exempt from testing for the first three years} hmmmm, I wonder if our district ever used this exemption considering we’re 90+% LEP.

Integration of language and content! (an increased interest) with support from Cummins.
Changes for NES in content instruction in grade-level classrooms:

Higher order thinking skills used to be reserved for the advanced students, now they’re required for all students, as the present workforce situation demands adaptive skills added onto the basic literacy and numeracy skills once required.
This information is backed up by the current research that says that these thinking skills are “fundamental to learning.” As well as essential in the content areas. Now the Government made calls for higher performance standards for all students (NCLBA). See the Goals 2000 stuff, etc. This type of thinking curriculum requires flexible authentic assessments that cannot be standardized. Of course this causes financial problems, that instead get simplified into thinking in one of two ways- One way of thinking is “You get what you assess” which means to teach to the test, the other is that: “You do not get what you do not assess”. Hmmmm. I ‘ve seen that first one before.
Basic assessment approaches to utilize are:
Prior knowledge- awesome info and referenced to fig. 7.3 on ways to elicit this; Conceptual knowledge- use semantic maps referred to fig. 7.4; and Reading comprehension (and all it’s complexities that go into it). In this latter subject, teachers have to consider assessing the students’ skills in:
L2 vocabulary (alternative ways of assessing this knowledge preferred- see pp. 180-181); concepts; thinking skills (see pp 181-182 and fig. 7.6); reasoning; discourse structure; text structure; interpretation; integration; paraphrase; summarize; note taking complications as well, and cloze tests.

Techniques were provided for the Assessment of:
-writing across the curriculum
-cloze tests
-thinking skills

In scoring math problem solving problems, accuracy and use of problem processes are scores for declarative and procedural knowledge (see fig. 7.10 scoring rubric for mathematics with a prerequisite of basic achievement skills). The self assessment example for math is a reminder to me to create one for pre-readers- using pictures.

Now for science and social studies both need to have scores for declarative and procedural knowledge as well… thus, needing age appropriate rubrics will be on my to do list… that will most likely be like a checklist that would have statements that at one time or another focus on these types of knowledge, the scientific process and their funds of knowledge, thus requiring the use of the K-W-L chart.
And social studies at this age level requires more of their prior knowledge put into practice and an expansion of their vocabulary. Thus the use of the K-W-L chart again.

The instructional uses of assessment as seen on pages 198-199 reminds me of the SIOP lesson

ch6 writing assessment O'Malley&Valdez

Writing was a subject that I loved personally growing up, but after learning about rubrics and scoring guides and having to judge someones writing, I've pretty much avoided doing too much free time, pleasurable writing. Now, I'm noticing that I am not expecting too much writing from my students like I planned to this year. Instead I see that I am focusing on the kind of stuff from the kindergarten GLEs like handwriting formation, writing name with capital letter, and going from top to bottom, left to right. The assessment from our district for this subject at the kindergarten level does not seem to expect too much either and the purpose is for level placement and most likely more for accountability compared to the purposes given here despite not being a bilingual district which we should be considering our high percentage of classified LEP students.
Anyways....
I was surprised to see that, "The types of knowledge required in writing go far beyond these familiar elements." Those four elements are: knowledge of content; procedural knowledge for organization; knowledge of discourse structures, syntactic forms, and conventions; and procedural knowledge for integrating all the other types of knowledge.! This last one blew me away. I was like- wow, I have that?
I was glad to see the information about Process writing in which I like the information about the conferencing part. I've heard about Writing Across the Curriculum before, but have not managed to incorporate it into my primary grade classrooms. I could imagine doing it quite easily with fluent writers, but with beginning writers- I find that I take dictation way too much for this to be effective right now. I hope I can learn to do it right.
So, as you can see, this chapter is more applicable to the teachers teaching the higher grades, but I'm sure there's room for adaptations (with lots of drawings and dictations? only?) as required by the state GLEs for kindergartners. Prompts are ok if relevant to the students.
I'm familiar with the 6 traits, and the 6+1 writing traits, and I have introduced it to the students , but I tend to get stuck on that first stage and not following through with the whole thing- even though the writer's workshop stuff is awesome, I think I need at least one more year with kindergartners to know how to effectively manage the time to do everything I've always wanted to do besides the adopted curriculum...
The scoring guides and rubrics I use for this subject at this grade level (K) has been the GLE's. Is that cheating? Still, I like the Figure 6.3 Developmental Descriptors of Writing, which I could use for instruction and assessment, and as a communication tool with parents since it looks friendly. Now, the figure 6.4 Process Writing Checklist provided me with great definitions of the postwriting strategies.
There's no doubt that self-assessments in writing are crucial, or else you'd end up like me- lost interest in pleasurable writing. I need to do these beginning with the checklist formats like the surveys of interest and awareness, writing strategies and writing checklist the author's provided. The information on the writing assessment in instruction will be one I plan to revisit a few times. And I plan to use the suggestion given about posting a writing sample and having students score it and I list the criteria they're using- hopefully sooner than later.

Ch. 10 Peregoy & Boyle. (2005). Reading Assessment & Instruction

The authors immediately pointed out that classroom assessments be a part of the instructional cycle. Effective direct instruction was described, which leads an isolated skill to a productive literacy strategy. I liked this information because it allowed me to breathe easier and feel less guilt about thinking of doing that, especially with kindergarteners I think that it's just easier on everyone if they are taught immediately a skill that will be a useful strategy in and out of school as a life skill. And what are those? I'm sure someone has a list. So, for now I see that it’s ok to effectively teach something directly that you see a child needing extra help in. And coming from these guys whom I already have a bias for because of their critical pedagogy chapters, I’d say this is sound, valid advice, to just directly teach effectively so that students can apply it as a strategy as soon as possible. School needs to be about learning and using strategies in different contexts to be contributing, critical thinkers of society.
The information in the beginning of the chapter was a welcome refresher on my reading vocabulary knowledge and self-reflection of my practices. I have to say that the section on the Resources that Non-Native English Speakers Bring to English Reading was helpful. Considering that I need to strengthen my philosophy on assessment, the familiar types of reading assessments defined by these authors allowed me to understand them from another perspective.
I know that I will be referring to this chapter for the guided reading section, especially. All in all, I have used some of these assessments described in this chapter before- but not from this perspective- for ELLs…. or even how to use the data gathered for instructional purposesas described through the IRI case study provided. Informal Reading Inventories, (IRI’s) are used to determine reading levels and now I am wondering if it’s like the DRA’s? I have this test box with the label DRA, with leveled books and questions to ask the students after they’ve read the story. The questions are more like a retell with some inferencing required. Anyways, the QRI-II sounds good, like the authors say.
I have not conducted an Echo Reading assessment formally, but I have used something like it as a quick informal spot check for my own pacing monitoring without documenting anything. This way described here sounds doable and may be useful to use for my age group of students.
We were given the chance to take a class on Reading First, and guided reading seemed to be a big part of it if my memory serves me right. We even had video tapes of actual guide reading lessons going on. This was back in the beginning of the millennium and decade.
I have not done ReQuests before- which sounds good and is badly needed
We’ve tried SSR as a whole school before but it is not like that anymore. Read Alouds are still needed in my grade level at least and that’s when I model comprehension strategies, although I want to and need to use it with the LEA.