In Chapter fifteen of their book, Strategies That Work, Harvey and Goudvis assert that the best way to prepare students for reading assessments is to teach them to be good readers. However, creating "good readers" requires differentiation, close reading and deep thinking, yet we want them to succeed in taking a standardized test with preset answers that include purposeful distractions (it makes me want to pull my hair out)! Harvey and Goudvis seem to understand this, offering strategies to help mitigate this dissonance. One of my favorites is having students explain not only why they chose the answer they did, but also why they did not choose another (textual evidence and deep thinking). So in fact, teaching students to be good readers is the best preparation we as educators can give them.
Keene and Zimmerman continue this train of though in Chapter 9 of Mosaic of Thought, emphasizing the importance of synthesizing while reading. Although this is commonly taught towards the end of the year (in order to synthesize, students must have a grasp of many strategies to use while reading), it needs to be interwoven and reinforced throughout the year--this is especially true for struggling readers who often make descisions about what they are reading early on, and never revise those descisions. If students are to successfully synthesize passages on a standardized test, they need to have lots of practice, in all genres first.
My favorite article in this module was "I'm Not Stupid:" How Assessment Drives (In) Appropriate Reading Instruction. I have read Dennis' article before, and feel she shares my frustration. In it, she points out that that score reports reflect students' abilities to master grade-level content standards as measured by state mandated assessments... this tells us nothing about why struggling readers are struggling. Student's need to be taught on their level with appropriate materials if they are to succeed, and the most valuable assessments are the ones that do more than just tell us if they are below, at or above benchmark. Educators need to know why readers struggle, not just confirm that they do.
Sadly, this does not change the reality of standardized testing as a requirement. Further complicating this are the special needs students that, as Lenski et al notes, we, as educators, are often unprepared for. In their article Assessing English Language Learners in Mainstream Classrooms, the authors assert the need for alternative assessments separated from language evaluations. Again, something that does not happen for all of our ELL students during standardized testing, often because they have not made it through the laborious "labeling" process required by the state in order to make allowances on "The Test." But at least I can do it in my classroom, and Ciechanowski's article provides some interesting insights for further instructing these students.
In it she discusses how people learn language-- specifically ELL students. She points out that "people do not learn English" in general, but rather "specific social language". (p.4). This is why some ELL students may seem proficient when socializing with peers, but may still struggle academically, because just like they learned specific social language, they need to learn content specific language as well. She advocates bringing together knowledge from everyday sources and academic curriculum to facilitate deeper understanding. For example, the movie Ice Age is a cartoon that many 3rd graders are familiar with. While is it seems as though it has nothing in common with an academic unit on glaciers, it serves to provide students with a visual, and asking questions that compare what a scientist knows about glaciers based on the students understanding of their text, to what the director of Ice Age must know (using textual evidence to support your answers) would enable students to delve more deeply into the subject. I believe this would be beneficial to all students, not just ELL students.
Keene and Zimmerman continue this train of though in Chapter 9 of Mosaic of Thought, emphasizing the importance of synthesizing while reading. Although this is commonly taught towards the end of the year (in order to synthesize, students must have a grasp of many strategies to use while reading), it needs to be interwoven and reinforced throughout the year--this is especially true for struggling readers who often make descisions about what they are reading early on, and never revise those descisions. If students are to successfully synthesize passages on a standardized test, they need to have lots of practice, in all genres first.
My favorite article in this module was "I'm Not Stupid:" How Assessment Drives (In) Appropriate Reading Instruction. I have read Dennis' article before, and feel she shares my frustration. In it, she points out that that score reports reflect students' abilities to master grade-level content standards as measured by state mandated assessments... this tells us nothing about why struggling readers are struggling. Student's need to be taught on their level with appropriate materials if they are to succeed, and the most valuable assessments are the ones that do more than just tell us if they are below, at or above benchmark. Educators need to know why readers struggle, not just confirm that they do.
Sadly, this does not change the reality of standardized testing as a requirement. Further complicating this are the special needs students that, as Lenski et al notes, we, as educators, are often unprepared for. In their article Assessing English Language Learners in Mainstream Classrooms, the authors assert the need for alternative assessments separated from language evaluations. Again, something that does not happen for all of our ELL students during standardized testing, often because they have not made it through the laborious "labeling" process required by the state in order to make allowances on "The Test." But at least I can do it in my classroom, and Ciechanowski's article provides some interesting insights for further instructing these students.
In it she discusses how people learn language-- specifically ELL students. She points out that "people do not learn English" in general, but rather "specific social language". (p.4). This is why some ELL students may seem proficient when socializing with peers, but may still struggle academically, because just like they learned specific social language, they need to learn content specific language as well. She advocates bringing together knowledge from everyday sources and academic curriculum to facilitate deeper understanding. For example, the movie Ice Age is a cartoon that many 3rd graders are familiar with. While is it seems as though it has nothing in common with an academic unit on glaciers, it serves to provide students with a visual, and asking questions that compare what a scientist knows about glaciers based on the students understanding of their text, to what the director of Ice Age must know (using textual evidence to support your answers) would enable students to delve more deeply into the subject. I believe this would be beneficial to all students, not just ELL students.