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