Strategies to Assess Reading Proficiency for Effective Instruction
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Use these five strategies to assess the reading proficiency of your students. These assessments will determine the individual reading abilities of your students and make it possible to build effective instruction accordingly.
Reading Proficiency is crucial for students to succeed. If they are not able to understand the texts in the classroom then they will fall more behind every day. It is important for teachers to be aware of the reading levels of their students so that students do not get left behind. Teachers can use assessments to tell how well students are reading, and once they collect data from assessments they can formulate effective instruction. Here are a few common assessment tools that teachers can use to collect data:
- Cloze
The Cloze procedure is one tool that can be used to quickly measure the reading proficiency of students. In a Cloze procedure, some words in a text are omitted and replaced with blank lines. Users are asked to identify and fill-in the missing words. The goal is to identify the exact word not a synonym.
Students often fail a Cloze test because their textbooks are usually written at a higher reading level. This is an opportunity to figure out who needs more help understanding the text. It is part of differentiated instruction and gives teachers a better look at how well the students follow a text.
- San Diego Reading Assessment
The San Diego Reading Assessment is a quick screening tool that helps assess a student’s ability to read words at their grade level. It helps estimate if a student will be able to read grade level reading material. However, this assessment focuses on measuring a child’s word recognition and is not a comprehensive reading evaluation.
- CARI
The Content Area Reading Inventory (CARI) is an informal measure of performance on reading materials. In this assessment, the teacher first selects a passage of 250-300 words, usually from the textbook. Next, the students will take 15-20 minutes to read, usually recording their start time, finish time, and total time.
After reading is complete, the students will write a brief summary of the article and answer between nine and twelve questions. The summary has to be written without looking at the passage. The questions can be of various types, directly from the text, interpretations of the text, or even application of the text to previous knowledge. CARI can be used to assess a student’s understanding in content areas.
- Vocabulary Knowledge Scale
Vocabulary Knowledge Scale is a simple informal assessment that can be used to assess a student’s knowledge of expected vocabulary. Students are given a list of words and are asked to rate the words, depending on how well they know them. This process helps them recall words, and also provides an opportunity for the teacher to introduce and discuss words that students may not be very familiar with.
- DIBELS
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (more commonly known as DIBELS) is a formal, standardized reading assessment that is being used by a large number of schools in the United States. This assessment has various components that are designed to assess the different components of reading. It is a comprehensive assessment that helps identify students with reading difficulties. In addition, it comes with instructional support that helps teachers plan strategies to provide differentiated instruction to students and help them build their skills.
Based on scores of thousands of students, DIBELS provides benchmark goals for each grade level. This assessment can also be used to collect school-wide data and assess the overall reading ability of the students in a school.
To conclude, it is important for every teacher, irrespective of the subject they teach, to be aware of each student’s reading level and difficulties. Using the above reading assessments, teachers can ensure that students are fully comprehending the material in a textbook and in the content that is given to them.
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