Formative Assessment for Literacy, Grades K-6: Building Reading and Academic Language Skills Across the Curriculum

225 Pages·2008·3 MB·English

by  Dr. Allison Bailey

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Copyright © 2008 by Corwin Press
All rights reserved. When forms and sample documents are included, their use is authorized only
by educators, local school sites, and/or noncommercial or nonprofit entities that have purchased
the book. Except for that usage, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Figures 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6 are reprinted from Bailey (Ed.), The Language Demands of School
(p. 177), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, by permission of Yale University Press.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bailey, Alison L.
Formative assessment for literacy, grades K-6 : building reading and academic language skills
across the curriculum / Alison L. Bailey, Margaret Heritage.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4129-4907-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4129-4908-8 (pbk.)
1. English language—Study and teaching (Elementary)—United States. 2. Language
arts—United States—Evaluation. 3. Educational tests and measurements—United States.
4. Effective teaching—United States. I. Bailey, Alison L. II. Heritage, Margaret.
III. Title.
LB1576.B24 2008
372.6′044—dc22 2007050192
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
08 09 10 11 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acquisitions Editor: Cathy Hernandez
Editorial Assistant: Ena Rosen
Production Editor: Veronica Stapleton
Copy Editor: Gretchen Treadwell
Typesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.
Proofreader: Dennis Webb
Indexer: Kirsten Kite
Cover Designer: Karine Hovsepian
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Table of Contents
Foreword vii
By Deborah Stipek
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
About the Authors xix
1. Formative Assessment: Stories of Language
and Literacy Learning 1
2. Making Reading Instruction and Assessment
Work for Students and Teachers 9
3. Formative Assessment: “Where Are My Students on
Their Journey?” 39
With Mouna Mana
4. Laying the Foundations for Reading Comprehension:
Assessing Listening and Speaking Skills 61
With Norma Silva, Gabriela Cardenas, and Olivia Lozano
Resource A: Stages of Listening Comprehension
and Speaking Skills 91
Resource B: Graphic Organizer—Formative Assessment
of Listening and Speaking During Content Classes 97
Resource C: Additional Formative Assessment Strategies
for Listening and Speaking Skills 98
5. The Essence of Reading: Assessing Reading Comprehension 105
With Barbara Jones
Resource D: Stages of Reading Comprehension Skills 147
6. Assessing Reading Through Writing 155
7. Schoolwide Formative Assessment 181
Index 197
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Foreword
A
nyone who thinks it is easy to teach reading needs to read this book.
It places in clear relief that reading is a multifaceted activity.
Teaching reading requires attention to every facet of reading development,
as well as closely assessing how children’s skills are evolving to ensure
that instruction constantly matches their needs. First, children need to
know the basics—that the scribbles on pages represent sounds which add
up to words which add up to sentences, that they read from left to right,
and so on. They need to develop phonological awareness, decoding, and
sight recognition of familiar words.
Reading also requires knowledge and experience. Most of us would
have no difficulty reading the words in an article on astrophysics, but
few of us would be able to make any sense of what we had “read,” just
as a child who is unfamiliar with baseball might have difficulty making
sense of a story about a baseball team. Vocabulary is also important, as
well as an understanding of grammatical structures. Most of us can get
the gist of a text, even if we don’t know one or two words. But consider
the child who is not familiar with many of the words, including words
central to the topic of the text. For many children, the problem is not in
decoding the words, it is in making sense of them. This is especially
true for those children who come to school with English as a second
language.
Indeed, language and reading skills are fundamentally related, yet
much of what is written on reading has little to say about its connection
to language development. This book integrates the two, making clear the
importance of developing academic language to enable students to read
texts in the disciplines they encounter in school. We now recognize that
reading, science, math, novels, and poetry require different kinds of
knowledge and vocabulary, and an understanding of different genres of
writing and styles of discourse. Like it or not, teachers of all disciplines
are reading teachers.
•
vii
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viii Formative Assessment for Literacy, Grades K–6
Students also need to develop the metacognitive skills required to
make sense of text—identifying key concepts and ideas, making appro-
priate inferences and connections with previous knowledge, assessing
comprehension, and so on. These strategies do not come naturally to
most children. They need to be taught, and teachers need to know how
to teach them.
Effective teachers need knowledge of the processes involved in
reading and the academic language in the domain in which they are
teaching. Moreover, they have to know how to teach all the various
aspects of reading. Just as important, they need to know their students’
current skills along the various dimensions to select appropriate mate-
rials and provide appropriate guidance to enable students to take their
skills to the next level. What makes the task particularly challenging is
the inevitable range of skills in a classroom of students. Whatever the
class, students will vary in their experiences, vocabularies, content
knowledge, use of comprehension strategies, and in the early grades,
decoding skills.
Assessment, therefore, is a critical part of effective teaching. Indeed,
teaching reading or any discipline without continuous assessment makes
little sense. Alison Bailey and Margaret Heritage understand the impor-
tance of ongoing, formative assessment. In this book, they explain how for-
mative assessment is different from other kinds of assessment and they
provide a comprehensive and detailed account of how it can be woven
into any instructional program that involves reading. To make concrete the
strategies they recommend, they provide many real-life applications of
formative assessment, including verbatim exchanges between teachers
and students, which illustrate teachers’ reasoning and inferences about
student learning in oral language and reading.
The book is based on the best research on reading and language devel-
opment and gives readers an opportunity to see nationally renowned
experts’ advice in their own words. But rather than a dreary summary of
research findings, this book brings alive knowledge from decades of read-
ing research by providing detailed descriptions and illustrations of the
practical implications for classroom teaching.
While the book reminds us how difficult teaching is, it comes to our
rescue by providing the kind of support teachers need to do it well. In all
respects, the authors of this book practice what they preach. They high-
light vocabulary that may be new to the reader, and they provide defini-
tions and many examples that illustrate the concepts they introduce. They
help make the concepts useful by illustrating them with vivid applica-
tions of the strategies being implemented in real classrooms. And they
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Foreword ix
provide tools (e.g., for assessment) that teachers can use in their own
classrooms. The authors also reassure readers who might be intimidated
by the complexity of the task that they don’t have to figure it all out in a
day or even alone. Just as teachers slowly and surely lead their children
to being proficient readers, this book provides scaffolding and a sug-
gested system of schoolwide support for teachers to develop their skills
as reading teachers.
Deborah Stipek
Dean, Stanford School of Education