1. Balanced Assessment in Reading Workshop
Aug 25, 2011
Referencing Teaching Reading in Small Groups
by Jennifer Serravallo, 2010

2. What do you already do?
Take a moment to reflect on the assessments you use with your readers.
After a minute or two, please turn and talk about:
1. What you use….
and
2. What it tells you about your students

3. Current Assessment Terms
Reading assessments can be categorized as:
diagnostic, formative, or summative;
informal or formal;
quantitative or qualitative.

4. We want to assess: Engagement with reading Fluency and intonation
Print work strategies
Comprehension
Conversational skills

5. Ways to Assess Engagement:
Engagement Inventories to observe:
Are the child’s eyes on print?
Is the child giggling at the funny parts?
Is the child turning pages at an acceptable pace?
What types of things distract a child from reading?
How many minutes can a child stay engaged with a book?

6. Ways to Assess Engagement:
Book Logs:
What types of books (genres, authors, levels) does the child tend to choose?
How many pages is the child reading per minute?
How many books does the child read per week?
How much time is spent reading at home versus reading at school?

7. Ways to Assess Engagement:
and Reading Interest Inventories:
What are a child’s attitudes toward reading?
With whom does a child like to share his reading?
What types of books (genres, authors) does the child report liking and disliking?

8. Fluency and Intonation:
Fluency affects comprehension, comprehension affects fluency (Kuhn 2008; Rasinski 2003)
In analyzing a child’s reading with an eye toward fluency, it is essential to go beyond just the speed with which a child can read and look at the qualities and dimensions within her fluent reading. (Serravallo, 2010)

9. Dimensions of Fluent Reading
Accuracy: The ability of a reader to identify words in text correctly or with precision
Automaticity: The recognition of words in text instantaneously without the use of strategy or other conscious effort.
Expression or Prosody: The aspects of reading such as stress, emphasis, and appropriate phrasing that, when taken together, create an expressive rendering of a text
Parsing or Phrasing: Maintaining appropriate syntax when reading; breaking a sentence into appropriate phrase units. Correct parsing aids comprehension.

10. Ways We Could Assess Fluency:
Running Records
One – on – one Conferences
Partnerships
Observations during minilessons and shared reading

11. Assessing Print Work
Readers use print work strategies to “attend to the visual information in print” and to utilize phonological, semantic, and syntactic information for “word-level problem solving” (Clay 2001, 145, 126)
As proficient readers, the strategies that we know are almost always underground. (Serravallo, 2010)

12. Ways to Assess Print Work:
Running Records:
❏Does that mistake/self-correction make sense (meaning)?
❏Does that mistake/self-correction sound right (syntax)?
❏Does that mistake/self-correction look right (visual)?
(We also assess use of these “sources of information” during one-on-one conferences)

13. Assessing Comprehension
Comprehension is at the heart of what it means to really read. Reading is thinking and understanding and getting at the meaning behind a text. (Serravallo, 2010)

14. Comprehension Skills
❏Activating prior knowledge before, during, and after reading a text
❏Determining the most important ideas and themes in a text
❏Creating visual and sensory images before, during, and after reading a text.
❏Asking questions
❏Predicting
❏Drawing inferences
❏Retelling and synthesizing
❏Using fix-up strategies when comprehension breaks down.

15. Ways We Could Assess Comprehension:
Running Record Comprehension Conversations
One-on-one conferences
Reading Notebook work and stop-and-jots (sticky notes)
Partner conversations/Whole class conversations

16. Assessing Conversation
Author/educator/social activists Katherine and Randy Bomer write in their book For a Better World: Reading and Writing for Social Action (2001) that “democracy exists only when people deliberate together,”
It is important to also listen for conversational skills as children talk. Helping children to work not only in a group, but also as a group helps children develop shared understanding, affiliation, and a “deeper sense of caring” (Johnston 2004).

17. Ways We Could Assess Conversation:
Whole Class Conversations
Interactive Read Aloud Turn-and- Talks
Partnership work (and later) Book Club Conversations

18. The Last Word…
As you form and plan for reading instruction, it is helpful to see students as individuals and keep your purpose in mind. Are you listening and observing for engagement? Fluency? Print work strategies? Comprehension? Conversational skills? Remember that you have more than one place to assess for each one of those behaviors and skills. The more information you have about a student, the more precise your assessment of each student will be. (Serravallo, 2010)