Blog Entry #8 Reading Assessment

           After reading Chapter 10 of Catching Readers Before They Fall (Johnson & Keier, 2010), I found myself more excited and confident about the upcoming early childhood literacy teaching. The reason is that this chapter has provided me so many questions to consider as well as so many good ideas to try out in practice.

I used to think that children are developing all by their own, and as teachers, you just need to plan and provide the environment for them to grow, especially when it comes to literacy learn. But now I cannot even agree with this thought, because emergent readers, does not grow into proficient all naturally, on the contrast, it requires lots of teacher’s guide and support, which come from all kinds of ongoing assessment. In this chapter, the authors states the reason why reading assessment is critical children: using the results of the assessments, teachers can better identify what are the problems in a reader’s literacy processing system, which strategies need to be taught to facilitate their text decoding, what is the next step to help the reader better comprehend the texts, etc. All of the above are significant questions to ask when teach reading, so we teachers can adjust strategies and teaching goals to meet every reader’s needs, especially for the struggling ones.

          I really like that the authors have provided information of many useful, formal or informal assessment tools to use with children, including Conferences, Anecdotal Note-Taking Opportunities (informal), Running Records, Developmental Reading Assessment 2, and Beginning Reader Assessments (formal). I feel like the assessments could be very effective and individualized when using informal and formal assessment tools together, just like comparing qualitative study and quantitative study on the same topic and it often seems to make more sense. For example, when assess a child’s reading abilities, use Conferences to see if the child comprehending the text, if s/he uses any strategic action to understand the text, if s/he enjoys reading,etc, in the meantime, use Running Records to see the child’s strategic behavior and information about what level text is appropriate for the child.

          All in all, effective assessments help teachers make appropriate decisions on the next steps of teaching literacy to a specific child. I found this article very informative and helpful for literacy teachers and want to try to use the tools in my future teaching.