Unless you only have one or two students in your classroom, you know that getting to know students and their strengths and weaknesses, and keeping track of their learning is an amazingly complex and difficult task. While the debate rages on over the format, significance, and frequency of school assessments, the need to monitor progress and identify difficulties in order to improve and differentiate instruction will never go away. 

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A great deal of information will come from your daily observations and interactions with students. By carefully attending to questions and concerns, taking note of confusions and reflecting on the success or failure of lessons  and activities, you will already have a good idea of how many of your students are doing and where you need to spend more time. Due to the multiple components of the Big 5 and the complexity of each one, however, a more formal and standardized assessment will provide you with more detailed and measurable data on your students' progress. Assessing students formally will also make it much easier to measure and track students who are receiving additional instruction (through Response to Intervention or otherwise) in order to access the general curriculum with the majority of their peers. Your school will most likely already have an assessment or program of choice in place which you will need to familiarize yourself with. A common choice to assess literacy skills that I will discuss here is known as the DIBELS, or Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​The DIBELS tests were designed with efficiency in mind. They are 1-minute 'snapshots' of student knowledge in the areas of phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, accuracy, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. Like Response to Intervention, the idea behind these tests is to quickly and easily identify struggling students before they fall so far behind that they have only a small chance of catching up. Student data is saved and logged for use by teachers and reading specialists to keep track of student needs. Students identified as needing additional support are tested more frequently, called Progress Monitoring, and given the necessary instruction until they catch up to their grade-level peers.

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The DIBELS program is comprised of 6 kinds of tests and can be used for students in grades K - 6.

- First Sound Fluency (FSF) assesses kindergarten students ability to identify the first sound in a word (phonemic awareness)

- Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) assess students in kindergarten and the beginning of 1st grade in the ability to recognize and name a series of letters.

- Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) gives an indication of phonemic awareness skills for kindergarteners and first graders.

- Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) is intended for kindergarteners through early second graders in their ability to decode nonsense words (phonics).

- DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (DORF) measures the number of words read correct per minute for 1st through 6th grade students.

- Daze measures comprehension for 3rd through 6th graders.

 

** Using the DIBELS benchmarks, teachers can quickly get an idea of where students are in their understanding of various literacy components. Keep in mind that DIBELS is not a diagnostic test and is not intended to reveal specific difficulties. Rather, it gives an easy overview of a student's abilities and should be used as a starting point to identify particular needs.

 

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Informal Reading Inventories (IRI)

An IRI is an individually administered reading test which helps a teacher to determine a student's reading level. Once students have mastered phonics and are ready to move onto improving fluency, it is crucial that they have ample practice time with material at an appropriate level. To improve fluency, students should be reading at an ​Independent Reading Level. This material is simpler than material requiring teacher support at the Instructional Level and is not overly difficult at the Frustration Level, but is something of interest to the student and containing familiar words. A student at this level should be reading with about 95% accuracy.

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To administer an IRI to your students, select a relatively short passage (100-200 words) at grade level and develop 5 comprehension questions. The student should read aloud to you from the passage, marking down any errors (word omission, substitution, mispronunciation, insertion, reversal and self-corrections) as they go. Afterwards, let the student reread the text to him/herself and answer the comprehension questions. Based on the accuracy of the student's oral reading and his or her understanding of the text, you can make a decision regarding the reading ability of that student, and increase or decrease the difficulty of the material you provide for independent practice.

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Other Assessment Strategies

Not every decision you make as a teacher needs to come from a scientifically-based evaluation. Making casual notes during daily routines and talking one-on-one with students can also give you a good idea of how things are going for your class. A good way to keep this kind of information together and available for reference is to maintain student portfolios. A portfolio can include many different kinds of data, including test scores, examples of student work, works in progress, student reflections, and anything else that seems relevant and appropriately represents the individual. Portfolios, while not without their drawbacks, can serve as extremely useful methods of tracking progress and helping students, parents and teachers understand the specific characteristics of the child's abilities and learning process.