Chapter 3 – Notes and Reflection
Notes:










Assessment and evaluation are often considered interchangeable, but they’re not.
o Assessment is formative; it’s ongoing and provides immediate feedback to
improve teaching and learning.
o Evaluation is summative; it’s final, generally administered at the end of a unit or a
school year to judge quality.
Classroom assessment drives instruction, ensures that students are making adequate
progress, determines the effectiveness of instruction, and documents students’
achievement.
Teachers use a combination of assessment tools to collect meaningful information about
what students know and do, that involves four steps: Planning, Monitoring, Evaluating,
and Reflecting.
Teachers plan for assessment at the same time they’re planning for instruction and think
about these questions and choose the assessment tools they’ll use to get answers:
o Do students have adequate background knowledge and vocabulary about the topic
to be taught?
o Are any students struggling to understand?
o Are students completing assignments?
o Are students exhibiting good work habits?
o Are students working responsibly with classmates?
o Have students learned the concepts that have been taught?
o Can students apply what they’ve learned in authentic literacy projects?
By planning for assessment before they begin teaching, teachers are prepared to use
assessment tools wisely, otherwise, classroom assessment often turns out to be hazard
and impromptu.
Monitoring is vital to student success and teachers monitor students’ learning every day
and use the results to make instructional decisions. As they monitor students’ progress
through observations, conferences, and other informal, formative procedures, teachers
learn about students and their individual strengths and weaknesses and about the impact
of their instruction.
Teachers become effective kid watchers, because they must focus on what students do as
they read or write, not on whether they’re behaving properly or working quietly.
Teachers usually observe a specific group of students each day so that over the course of
a week, they watch everyone in the class.
Teachers make notes about students’ reading and writing activities, the questions students
ask, and the strategies and skills they use fluently and those they don’t understand.
Teachers use diagnostic assessments to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses,
examine areas of difficulty in detail, and decide how to modify instruction to meet
students’ needs, diagnostic test examines students’ achievement in phonemic awareness,
phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and other components of literacy
development.
Teachers assess students who speak a language other than English at home to determine
their English language proficiency. They typically use commercial oral language tests to




determine if students are proficient in English and if they’re not, teachers place them in
appropriate English language development programs and monitor their progress toward
English language proficiency.
Oral assessments consist on the ability to listen, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and
grammar.
English learners face two challenges: learning to speak English at the same time they’re
learning to read. They learn to read the same way that native English speakers do, but
they face additional challenges because their knowledge of English phonology,
semantics, syntax, and pragmatics is limited and their background knowledge is different.
EL’s writing involves fluency, form, and correctness, so teachers’ assessment of students’
writing should incorporate these components:
o Monitor students’ ability to write quickly, easily, and comfortably.
o Assess students’ ability to apply writing genres, develop their topic, or organize
the presentation of ideas, and use sophisticated vocabulary and a variety of
sentence structures.
o Verify that students control Standard English grammar and usage, spell most
words correctly, and use capitalization and punctuation conventions appropriately.
Portfolios help students, teachers, and parents see patterns of growth from one literacy
milestone to another in ways that aren’t possible with other types of assessment. Students
feel ownership of their work, become more responsible about their work, and set goals
and are motivated to work toward accomplishing them.