I Am a Teacher

I am a counselor and psychologist to a problem-filled child, I am a police officer that controls a child gone wild. I am a travel agent scheduling our trips for the year, I am a confidante that wipes a crying child's tear. I am a banker collecting money for a ton of different things, I am a librarian showing adventures that a storybook brings. I am a custodian that has to clean certain little messes, I am a psychic that learns to know all that everybody only guesses. I am a photographer keeping pictures of a child's yearly growth, When mother and father are gone for the day, I become both. I am a doctor that detects when a child is feeling sick, I am a politician that must know the laws and recognize a trick. I am a party planner for holidays to celebrate with all, I am a decorator of a room, filling every wall. I am a news reporter updating on our nation's current events, I am a detective solving small mysteries and ending all suspense. I am a clown and comedian that makes the children laugh, I am a dietician assuring they have lunch or from mine I give them half. When we seem to stray from values, I become a preacher, But I'm proud to have to be these people because ... I'm proud to say, "I am a teacher."

by
Stacy Bonino

Assessing Reading

Reading ability is very difficult to assess accurately. In the communicative competence model, a student's reading level is the level at which that student is able to use reading to accomplish communication goals. This means that assessment of reading ability needs to be correlated with purposes for reading.

Authentic Assessment

In order to provide authentic assessment of students' reading proficiency, a post-listening activity must reflect the real-life uses to which students might put information they have gained through reading.

• It must have a purpose other than assessment
• It must require students to demonstrate their level of reading comprehension by completing some task

To develop authentic assessment activities, consider the type of response that reading a particular selection would elicit in a non-classroom situation. For example, after reading a weather report, one might decide what to wear the next day; after reading a set of instructions, one might   repeat them to someone else; after reading a short story, one might discuss the story line with friends.
Use this response type as a base for selecting appropriate post-reading tasks. You can then develop a checklist or rubric that will allow you to evaluate each student's comprehension of specific parts of the text.

Approaches to Reading

Reading is an active skill which involves inferencing, guessing, predicting etc. It also has, more often than not, a communicative function. We rarely answer questions after reading a text except in a language class, but we do write answers to letters, follow directions, choose restaurants and holidays, solve problems and compare the information to our previous knowledge or the knowledge of others.WHAT SKILLS DO WE NEED TO READ SUCCESSFULLY?
Look at the following subskills, consider each at two different levels (e.g. advanced and beginners) and then number the ten most important skills for each level.
* Recognising the script of a language.
* Deducing the meaning of unfamiliar lexical items.
* Understanding explicitly stated information.
* Understanding conceptual meaning.
* Understanding the communicative values of sentences and utterances.
* Understanding relations within the sentence.
* Interpreting text by going outside it.
* Identifying main points in a discourse.
* Extracting salient points to summarise.
* Basic reference skills (contents, index, abbreviations, ordering).
* Skimming.
* Scanning.

Reading Assessment Techniques

Reading comprehension assessments are the most common type of published reading test that is available. The most common reading comprehension assessment involves asking a child to read a passage of text that is leveled appropriately for the child, and then asking some explicit, detailed questions about the content of the text (often these are called IRIs).

Because comprehension is what is being measured, language comprehension can be assessed in basically the same way reading comprehension is assessed. With language comprehension assessment, however, the child should not be expected to read any text. Everything from the instructions to the comprehension questions should be presented verbally to the child.

As mentioned earlier, oral reading accuracy is one form of decoding assessment, but it is not a very "clean" assessment. Teachers need to be aware that, in their early attempts to acquire reading skills, children apply many different strategies, some of which are hard to detect. Children often attempt to guess words based on the context or on clues provided by pictures — most of the time, a child’s guesses are inaccurate, and their difficulties with decoding are revealed, but sometimes the child guesses correctly, making the teacher believe that the child accurately decoded the word.


Linguistic Knowledge is the synthesis of three more basic cognitive elements -- phonology, semantics, and syntax. Linguistic knowledge is more than the sum of it's parts, but it does not lend itself to explicit assessment. A child may have a grasp on the more basic cognitive elements, but still have trouble blending these elements together into a stable linguistic structure.

The Importance of Reading is difficult to express in words but can experienced by people from all walks of life. Reading has a host of benefits - tangible and intangible and should infact become a habit as common as bathing or eating.

Techniques for Testing

Testing is an important part of every teaching and learning experience. We who teach English are generally expected to be accountable for the results of our instruction.

Multiple-Choice Items

A multiple-choice item presents a problem or question in the stem of the item and requires the examinee to select the best answer or option. The options consist of a most-correct answer and one or more distracters.

The major purpose of a multiple-choice item is to identify examinees that do not have complete command of the concept or principle involved. In order to accomplish this purpose, the foils or distracters must appear as reasonable as the correct answer to students who have not mastered the material. 

True / False Questions

Advantages:

• Can test large amounts of content
• Students can answer 3-4 questions per minute

Disadvantages:

• They are easy
• It is difficult to discriminate between students that know the material and students who don't
• Students have a 50-50 chance of getting the right answer by guessing
• Need a large number of items for high reliability

Tips for Writing Good True/False items:

• Avoid double negatives.
• Avoid long/complex sentences.
• Use specific determinants with caution: never, only, all, none, always, could, might, can, may, sometimes, generally, some, few.
• Use only one central idea in each item.
• Don't emphasize the trivial.
• Use exact quantitative language

Matching Format 

Types:

• Terms with definitions
• Phrases with other phrases
• Causes with effects
• Parts with larger units
• Problems with solutions

Advantages:

• Maximum coverage at knowledge level in a minimum amount of space/preptime
• Valuable in content areas that have a lot of facts

Disadvantages:

• Time consuming for students
• Not good for higher levels of learning

Tips for Writing Good Matching items:

• Need 15 items or less.
• Give good directions on basis for matching.
• Use items in response column more than once (reduces the effects of guessing).
• Use homogenous material in each exercise.
• Make all responses plausible.
• Put all items on a single page.
• Put response in some logical order (chronological, alphabetical, etc.).
• Responses should be short.

Short Answer

Advantages:

• Easy to construct
• Good for "who," what," where," "when" content
• Minimizes guessing
• Encourages more intensive study-student must know the answer vs. recognizing the answer.

Disadvantages:

• May overemphasize memorization of facts
• Take care - questions may have more than one correct answer
• Scoring is laborious

Tips for Writing Good Short Answer Items:

• When using with definitions: supply term, not the definition-for a better judge of student knowledge.
• For numbers, indicate the degree of precision/units expected.
• Use direct questions, not an incomplete statement.
• If you do use incomplete statements, don't use more than 2 blanks within an item.
• Arrange blanks to make scoring easy.
• Try to phrase question so there is only one answer possible.

For the student, testing is a good idea because this is an ideal opportunity to pause, take stock of the material studied over the recent period, and process it so that it is properly understood. In addition, there is always the satisfaction of passing the test and really feeling that you know something. And if you don't pass, there is the challenge of having to relearn the material and make sure that you do know it next time. Building self-esteem from one's successes and strengthening the character by dealing with one's failures are both important lessons in life that a child can take with them into adult life and forever.

The Process of Developing Assessment

Assessment is the process of documenting, usually in measurable terms, knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs.
Assessment should be valid and reliable. A valid assessment is one which measures what it is intended to measure. For example, it would not be valid to assess driving skills through a written test (alone); the most valid way of assessing driving skills would be through a combination of practical assessment and written test. Teachers frequently complain that some examinations do not properly assess the syllabus upon which the examination is based; they are, effectively, questioning the validity of the exam.
Reliability relates to the consistency of an assessment. A reliable assessment is one which consistently achieves the same results with the same (or similar) cohort of students. Various factors affect reliability -- including ambiguous questions, too many options within a question paper, vague marking instructions and poorly trained markers.
A good assessment is valid and reliable. Note that an assessment may be reliable but invalid or unreliable and invalid, but an assessment can not be unreliable and valid. In practice, an assessment is rarely completely valid or entirely reliable.
The teaching and learning cycle represents the four stages that occur in the design and delivery of classroom tasks that incorporate an outcomes-based approach. The cycle has no start or end point, with each step informing the next. It is the process of gathering data and reflection that dictates where in the cycle you need to be operating.

What does the teaching and learning cycle look like?

 

Planning and Teaching

Effective planning leads to focused teaching.  Using the analysis of the sample, the teacher plans for the teaching event.  The teacher’s understandings of the reading process and writing process guide her in selecting a teaching objective.

Instruction can be whole group, small group, or individual.  The teacher will often group children with similar needs.  She chooses a resource that will help her achieve her objective and then determines the approach based on the amount of support needed by the learner(s).  Students of all ages experience being read to, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading, and writing demonstrations, shared writing, guided writing, and independent writing on a daily basis. 

The teacher’s careful planning provides an experience for the student that scaffolds new learning, that lifts the learner to the next level of understanding, and that in the process provides a new assessment sample for the teacher to evaluate.

Specifications

A specification is a detailed description of exactly what is being assessed and how it is being done. An assessment instrument built on specifications is coherent and cohesive. Specifications might include:

• general description of the assessment
• list of skills to be tested
• teciques for assessing
• expected level of performance  

Assessment is important because of all the decisions you will make about children when teaching and caring for them. The decisions facing our three teachers at the beginning of this chapter all involve how best to educate children. Like them, you will be called upon every day to make decisions before, during, and after your teaching. Whereas some of these decisions will seem small and inconsequential, others will be “high stakes,” influencing the life course of children. All of your assessment decisions taken as a whole will direct and alter children’s learning outcomes.