Start with Assessment This unit comes with a pre- and post-assessment of comprehension skills that are especially important in the unit. You’ll find more details about these assessments, including printable resources for students and related scoring rubrics in the online resources. These resources will evolve in response to data, and we expect this to be a growing repository of tools and insights around assessment. At the school or district level, there are some decisions to be made pertaining to this assessment. It is designed to assess higher-level reading comprehension skills—skills such as determining the main idea in nonfiction and inferring character traits in fiction. Readers cannot demonstrate those skills if the passage is one they cannot read with enough automaticity for them to access the passage. Therefore, if you have students who are reading below benchmark, it will be essential for you to read the pre- and post-assessment passages aloud to them. Many schools decide to make this a listening assessment, with teachers reading these passages aloud to all students, while also giving all students access to printed copies for reference. The advantage of that decision is that it provides all students with equivalent experiences. Other schools, on the other hand, decide to read the passage aloud only to students who are reading below benchmark levels and to channel students reading at or above benchmark levels to read the passage independently. The advantage of that is the assessment more closely mirrors constructed responses on high stakes exams. These pre- and post-assessments are just one part of a portfolio of assessments. You will also want to use an Oral Reading Fluency assessment, such as those in Acadience ® , DIBELS ® , MAP ® , and other screeners to determine words-correct-per-minute, and then to use the Hasbrouck-Tindal scale to determine the individual’s overall proficiency score. Those scores have proven to be efficient and valid indicators of overall reading well-being. For students scoring below benchmark for the time of the year, additional diagnostics will be important. Throughout any unit, there are many other ways to collect and study evidence of your students’ progress. Always, the purpose of assessment is to inform instruction. Rubrics and exemplars can help guide your interpretations of data. It is especially important to look at growth over time, so be sure to gather cumulative data that reveals progress across years. Prior to giving any assessment, you’ll always want to review your students’ IEPs and 504 plans for testing accommodations. It’s important to establish testing routines with students at the start of the year to help them learn how to use their accommo- dations well, prior to standardized assessments.
See the Welcome to the Unit for more information related to assessments.
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Bend I • Strengthen Nonfiction Research Skills: Researching Plants
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