Reading Success for All Students: Using Formative Assessment to Guide Instruction and Intervention

About the Book

Reading Success for All Students: Using Formative Assessment to Guide Instruction and Intervention features a full range of formative assessments designed to yield useful information about phonemic awareness, concepts of print, letter knowledge, phonics, high-frequency words, developmental spelling, fluency, syllabic analysis, vocabulary, and a range of comprehension skills. The assessments were constructed to yield a maximum of instructionally useful information. For example, the Phonics Inventory is geared to the scope and sequence of skills used in most programs so that the results of the assessment indicate which specific skills the student has learned and which need to be taught.

Accompanying each assessment are step-by-step explanations of researched-based teaching techniques that can be used to instruct the students in needed skills as revealed by the assessments. Instructional techniques are presented according to intensity. If students don't respond to the standard technique, the teacher can select a more intense technique or even a different approach from the sections entitled Suggestions for Students Still Having Difficulty.

Featured in the text are specialized teaching techniques designed to be successful with the most severely disabled learners. These include articulating sounds to foster phonemic awareness, using phonics to learn high-frequency (sight) words, using mnemonics to learn vowel correspondences, using mystery passages and macro cloze to improve predicting and inferring, and using manipulatives to build basic literal comprehension. Both instruction and assessment incorporate the Common Core State Standards.

About the Author

Thomas G. Gunning, a former middle school English and reading teacher and an elementary school reading consultant, is professor emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University, where he was department chairperson and director of the Reading Clinic. He is currently an adjunct professor in the Reading and Language Arts Department at Central Connecticut State University, where he teaches courses in assessment and intervention.

Gunning has been a consultant for elementary and middle schools in areas ranging from improving the core curriculum, implementing response to intervention, and planning programs for disabled readers. Trained as a Junior Great Books discussion leader, he has tried out this approach to reading instruction and intervention with students in an urban elementary school. Recently he served as a hands-on consultant for a Reading First school.

Gunning has conducted research on group reading inventories, vocabulary assessment, reading disabilities, intervention programs, readability, response to intervention, decoding processes and strategies, and literacy skills needed to cope with high-stakes tests.

Gunning is author of Reading Comprehension Boosters: 100 Lessons for Building Higher-Level Literacy for Grades 3–5 (Jossey-Bass). He has also written Creating Literacy Instruction for All Children, 7th Ed.; Assessing and Correcting Reading and Writing Difficulties, 4th Ed; Developing Higher-Level Literacy in All Students; and Closing the Literacy Gap, all published by Allyn & Bacon. He is coauthor with James Collins of Building Struggling Students' Higher Level Literacy: Practical Ideas, Powerful Solutions (International Reading Association), and author of Word Building, a Response to Intervention Program, designed for students with decoding problems (Phoenix Learning Resources & Galvin Publishing), and of a number of children's books, including Strange Mysteries (Dodd-Mead), Amazing Escapes (Dodd-Mead), and Dream Cars (Dillon).

Introduction

While working as a hands-on consultant in an urban school, I was able to witness the power of using formative assessment to screen students, establish a starting point for instruction, monitor progress, and modify instruction as needed. When instruction was aligned with assessment, the results were breathtaking. For instance, because of formative assessment that revealed their needs and because of intervention that met those needs, the four lowest-achieving readers in first grade ended the year reading on, beyond, or almost on grade level according to both the Phonics Inventory, discussed in Chapter Two, which was used to monitor their progress, and the TerraNova, the school's standardized outcome measure. At the beginning of the year the students were able to read just one or two words. By year's end they demonstrated mastery of single-syllable phonics. Actually, it was a good year for all of the school's first graders. More than 80 percent of them were reading on grade level by year's end. Formative assessment and aligned instruction also work at higher levels. Using the Mystery Paragraphs Think Aloud and other techniques suggested by the results of these assessments, as explained in Chapter Eight, a tutor was able to transform a reluctant fifth grader whose comprehension was virtually nil into an enthusiastic reader whose comprehension was near perfect.

The key to success in these three instances was using instruments that yielded information that could be translated into instruction, and then monitoring student progress and modifying instruction as needed. Reading Success for All Students presents formative assessments in eight key areas: early reading skills, phonics, recognition of high-frequency words, syllabic and morphemic analysis, spelling, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The formative measures offered in this book were selected or constructed on the basis of their potential for yielding instructionally useful information.

In addition, assessment measures were selected on the basis of their capacity to assess a wide range of abilities. Many tests currently in use are written on grade level. However, the students in a typical class have a wide range of achievement, with a number reading below grade level and others reading above grade level. Tests were selected or modified so that there was provision for both below- and above-level readers. For instance, maze assessment, which is used as a group screening measure of basic comprehension, is generally administered on grade level. This book provides cumulative maze assessment, which contains passages below, above, and on grade level so that all students may be adequately assessed and their growth measured.

Dynamic Assessment

At times the data that assessments yield are not adequate. Reading Success for All Students offers suggestions for complementing testing with observations and dynamic assessment. In dynamic assessment, the student is provided with prompts or probes for items missed or is tested at lower levels. The basic idea is to determine what the student does know or can do so that existing knowledge and skills can be built on. For instance, a student might do poorly on a comprehension assessment that requires writing a constructed response, but might demonstrate adequate comprehension when given a multiple-choice test or when asked to retell a selection orally or answer questions. Dynamic assessment includes trial teaching. As the name suggests, trial teaching entails using gathered data to hypothesize what kinds of techniques or approaches might work with a student or group of students and then trying out those techniques. For instance, at the urban elementary school, I used a comprehension technique known as reciprocal teaching in which four key strategies—predicting, questioning, summarizing, and clarifying—are used to foster comprehension. Through the use of this technique I was able to determine students' strengths and weaknesses, and how discussions might be used to develop their comprehension. Suggestions for dynamic assessment are made throughout this book.

Purpose of Assessments

Tests perform four key functions: screening, monitoring, diagnosis, and outcome assessment. Screening tests typically survey a key skill and are generally brief so they can be taken in a minimum amount of time. Monitoring tests also assess a key skill area. They are generally given three times a year but are given more frequently to students judged to be at risk. Such students are monitored once a month or even more frequently, though research by Jenkins, Graff, and Miglioretti (2009) indicates that monitoring every three weeks or once a month is enough. The purpose of monitoring is to track and assess students' progress, but also to assess the school's program. As a rule of thumb, finding more than 20 percent of students to be at risk suggests deficiencies in the core program.

Screening tests may also be used for monitoring. Screening and benchmark tests (those monitoring tests given three times a year) typically assess grade-level skills in order to discern whether students are achieving at an adequate level. The benchmark tests are used to measure how many and which students are meeting the school's benchmarks and which students are falling behind. However, tests given monthly or more frequently, to monitor intervention, should be on the students' reading levels. Otherwise, growth cannot be adequately measured.

Outcome tests are used to measure overall literacy outcomes, usually at the end of the semester or year. State tests, district tests, and nationally standardized tests are typically used as outcome measures.

Curriculum-based tests are often used to screen students and monitor progress. They are actually not based on the curriculum. Rather, they are based on general indicators of progress. Tests of word reading and oral reading fluency and maze assessment are the most frequently used curriculum-based measures.

Efficient and Effective Assessment

Assessment should be efficient. Time taken away from instruction should be minimized. However, assessment also needs to be effective. It needs to yield information needed for instruction. One way of creating a program that is both efficient and effective is to start with the general and move to the specific as needed. For instance, start out with a general screening assessment and then provide specific assessments for students who need them. For example, a maze comprehension test might be used to screen all fourth graders. Students who do poorly could then be tested with an oral reading fluency measure to see if fluency or decoding skills are an issue. If students do poorly on that measure, they might then be given the Syllable Survey. However, observation and other informal measures might be used to provide additional information about the comprehension of students who do well on the maze assessment but poorly on higher-level comprehension tasks. First graders who do poorly on the Phonics Inventory might be given the Beginning Consonant Correspondences test and, if they do poorly on that, the Beginning Consonant Sounds test, which is a test of phonemic awareness. The idea is to provide the minimum of testing needed but as much assessment as required to discover students' specific needs. A chart of the assessments offered in this book is provided in Table I.1

Table I.1 Assessment Chart

Instructional Component

Of course the ultimate purpose of assessment is not to obtain data, no matter how valid they may be. The ultimate purpose is to improve students' achievement. Each assessment provided in this book is accompanied by suggestions for instructing the students. Because some of them have more difficulty learning than others, additional suggestions are made for students who continue to struggle. The suggestions presented are those that are research-based and/or judged by the author to be most effective. In addition, a number of commercial intervention programs are listed, none of which have any connection, financial or otherwise, with the author.

Both the instruction and the assessments offered here incorporate Common Core State Standards. At this point, the Standards provide the most widely accepted objectives for literacy. Each of the following chapters begins by listing the anchor Common Core State Standards covered in that chapter.

Chapter 1

Early Reading

Common Core State Standards Addressed in This Chapter

Print Concepts

Kindergarten

Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print.

Follow words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page.

Recognize that spoken words are represented in written language by specific sequences of letters.

Understand that words are separated by spaces in print.

Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.

Grade 1

Demonstrate understanding of the organization and basic features of print. Recognize the distinguishing features of a sentence (e.g., first word, capitalization, ending punctuation)

Phonological Awareness

Kindergarten

Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

Recognize and produce rhyming words.

Blend and segment onsets and rimes of single-syllable spoken words.

Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words. (Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-syllable words to make new words.

Grade 1

Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

Orally produce single-syllable words by blending sounds (phonemes), including consonant blends.

Segment spoken single-syllable words into their complete sequence of individual sounds (phonemes).

Source: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010.

Early reading encompasses skills and understandings that provide a foundation for formal reading instruction. These are the skills necessary to learn to read printed words. Although all students come to school with some knowledge of reading and writing, that knowledge varies greatly. To provide an appropriate program for all students, it is important to know where each student is. The most critical skill areas in early reading are letter identification and phonemic awareness. Letter identification is the ability to name the letters of the alphabet. Phonemic awareness is the ability to isolate the separate phonemes or speech sounds in words. The following measures for assessing students' current standing with these skills are presented in this chapter: Letter Identification, Letter Recognition, Rhyming, Matching Beginning Sounds, Saying Beginning Sounds, Blending Onset and Rime, Blending Phonemes, Phoneme Segmentation, and Manipulating Sounds: Deleting Onsets. (The onset is the consonant or consonants that precede a vowel in a word: h+at, ch+at. The rime is the part of the word that begins with a vowel; it may be followed by one or more consonants: g+o, g +oat.) Table 1.1 provides a form for recording performance on these early literacy assessments.

Table 1.1 Performance on Early Literacy Assessments

Letter Names

The best indicator of how well students will do in a formal reading program is letter knowledge. The ability to name letters demonstrates that students have sufficient memory ability to associate abstract symbols with spoken names. Letter knowledge can also indicate that the student comes from an environment in which literacy skills are fostered. Knowledge of both uppercase and lowercase letters is assessed. Young students generally are able to identify or recognize more uppercase than lowercase letters.

Letter Identification

Description

Students identify the twenty-six uppercase and twenty-six lowercase letters.

Target Population

Students in pre-K can be tested in the spring or at the end of the year. Kindergarteners can be tested at any time of the year. First graders would generally be assessed at the beginning of the year. However, first graders who are lagging behind can be tested at any time of the year. Students in grades 2 and beyond may be assessed on letter knowledge if it is suspected that they might not be able to identify all the letters of the alphabet. Older English language learners whose native language uses a different alphabet from the Roman alphabet might need assessment and instruction in letter names.

Administration

Distribute a copy of the test and explain the purpose of the assessment. Say to the student, I want to see how many letters you know. You might not know the names of some of the letters. That is okay. Just do your best. If you don't know the name of a letter, you can say, ‘I don't know.’ Look at your paper. You will see rows of letters. When I point to a letter, tell me the name of the letter.

Record the student's performance on a separate sheet. Draw a line through a missed or incorrectly read letter. Record incorrect responses above the crossed-out letter. The responses might show that the child is confusing letters on the basis of similarity of appearance—uppercase E and F, for example. Administer the uppercase letters subtest first. If a student fails to respond within about 5 seconds, move on to the next letter. If a student cannot identify any uppercase letters or knows only one or two, the lowercase subtest may be skipped. If a student says she doesn't know any letters, show the child her name and ask if she can tell you any of the letters in it.

The Letter Identification test can also be used to assess letter name fluency. In a letter name fluency assessment, students read as many letters as they can in 1 minute. They move on to the lowercase letters immediately after naming the uppercase ones. Even if administered as a fluency measure, the Letter Identification test can be used to see how many letters students can identify in an untimed administration. After 1 minute, draw a vertical line after the last letter named and continue the test to see how many additional letters the students can identify. Timing the administration of the assessment gives a sense of how automatic the student's letter recognition is. A student who can name the letters immediately has a better grasp than the student who needs time to retrieve the letter names from memory. It is also important, however, to determine how many letters the student can identify so that this information can be used to teach the letters the student missed. A student who has a low score on letter naming fluency but a high score on overall identification might just need more experience working with letters.

Interpretation

A reasonable expectation is that kindergarteners would be able to identify ten to twelve lowercase letters at the beginning of kindergarten and all the letters by year's end (Invernizzi, Juel, Swank, & Meier, 2005). Expectations for letter naming and other assessments can be found in the Assessment Chart in the Introduction to this book. In addition to determining how many uppercase and lowercase letters students can recognize, look for patterns of errors that might be helpful when planning instruction. Students might be confusing b, d, p, and q, or E and F, for instance. This could be a directionality issue. Students might not be proceeding from left to right and top to bottom consistently. Or it may be a memory issue. The student might not remember which letter is b or which is d. Directionality is reinforced by having in place a handwriting program that explicitly explains how strokes are to be made. Memory might require a mnemonic device, such as making fists so that the knuckles of each hand are touching with the thumbs up to help students remember the difference between b and d. The left hand represents b. The right hand represents d. The left hand comes before the right hand just as b comes before d in the alphabet.

Letter Recognition

Description

Students select from four options the letter named by the examiner. The test can be given to groups as well as to individuals.

Administration

To administer the Letter Recognition test to a group of students, distribute a copy of the assessment and a strip of cardboard about the size of a ruler that can be used as a marker to be placed under the line of letters being tested so that students have no difficulty focusing on a row of possible responses. Explain the purpose of the assessment. Say to students, "I want to see how many letters you know. Look at your papers. You will see rows of letters. I am going to say the name of a letter and then I'm going to ask you to make a circle around that letter. Let's do the first one for practice. Find the ball. Now put your marker under the ball. [Check to make sure all students are focusing on the sample row.] Now find the letter X and make a circle around it. Here is what the letter X looks like [write it on the board]. Find it and make a circle around it." Check to make sure that all students have drawn a circle around the X.

"Now move your marker down to the row that has a cat. Look at the letters in that row and draw a circle around the letter S. Draw a circle around the letter S." Using this same procedure, have students draw a circle around the following letters:

Figure 1.1

source: Gunning, T. (2011). Word Building, Beginnings (2nd ed.). Honesdale, PA: Phoenix Learning Resources. Reprinted by permission of Galvin Publishing.

Interpretation

A score of 8 out of 10 is adequate. Eventually, of course, students will need to learn all the letters. As you assess students' performance, in addition to determining how many letters they are able to recognize, compare their performance on uppercase compared with lowercase letters. Generally students do better with uppercase letters. Also note any confusion of similar letters and consider opportunities for learning. If a student recognizes very few letters but has not been in a program in which letters were taught, he may have no difficulty learning letters.

Individual Administration

To administer the Letter Recognition test to an individual, point to the first letter in row 1 and ask the student to say the letter's name. Do this for each letter until you reach the letter Q. At that point you will have checked all twenty-six uppercase letters. Follow the same procedure for assessing knowledge of lowercase letters. However, discontinue testing if the student misses five letters in a row or if it is otherwise obvious that he doesn't know the letters.

When given as an individual measure, the Letter Recognition test requires that letters be identified, which is a more difficult task than recognizing the letters, which is what is involved in a group administration. If a student has difficulty identifying letters, switch to the administration that you would use with a group; ask him to draw a circle around the letter you name and see if he knows the letters on a recognition level.

Dynamic Assessment

If students experience difficulty identifying letters on the Letter Identification test, administer the Letter Recognition test. Selecting from four choices a letter named by the examiner is easier than naming a letter to which the examiner points. To determine a student's ability to learn letters, teach a series of three letters and see how many letters the student learns in the session. Use the suggestions in the Teaching Suggestions section entitled Letter Names. Note the kinds of learning tasks that are most helpful.

Phonological Awareness

The second best predictor of students' early reading achievement is phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability to think