Assessment examples for specific areas of reading There are various ways to gather assessment data. Teachers can test students, analyze student work samples, observe students performing literacy tasks, or interview students on their reading skills. Teachers can gain the most information by administering all of these methods to collect data. The following information describes various types of assessments for different areas of early reading. Each assessment identified is described in the resources section of this brief.
Letter knowledge: the ability to associate sounds with letters One example of an assessment for letter knowledge is to present a student with a list of letters and ask the student to name each letter. Another example is to have a student separate the letters from a pile of letters, numbers, and symbols. Students can also be asked to separate and categorize letters by uppercase and lowercase (Torgesen, 1998; Wren, 2004).
Phonemic awareness: the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words These assessments examine a student's knowledge of how sounds make words. A student can be asked to break spoken words into parts, or to blend spoken parts of a word into one word. Additionally, a student can count the number of phonemes in a word to demonstrate understanding, or a student can delete or add a phoneme to make a new word (Torgesen, 1998; Wren, 2004).
Reading comprehension: the process of understanding the meaning of text There are many types of reading comprehension assessments. One type involves a student reading a passage that is at an appropriate level for the student, and then having the student answer factual questions about the text. A second type involves a student answering inferential questions about implied information in the text. A third type involves a student filling in missing words from a passage. A fourth type is to have a student retell the story in their own words
The assessment tasks prepared for assessing reading skills only serve the pre-decided purposes of assessment. The variety in the texts and tasks used add to the validity of the assessment. Students are expected to only scan, skim, infer and understand the structure and meaning of the texts. They are not asked to and may have to use very little of other language-skills to complete the tasks. Writing has been minimized in every possible way; vocabulary-based questions have been kept to minimum; and there is almost no demand for displaying explicit grammatical ability.
The assessment is expected to have positive washback on teaching, learning, teacher and learner. Such an assessment will help the teacher and student do away with memory-based tests. The teacher may find it easy to identify the problem areas (in relation to reading) of students. If used wisely, the tasks may promote learner autonomy. The teacher can also collect information about the assessment from students and make further improvements.
