Reflection on Two articles

Response to Intervention (RTI): What Teachers of Reading Need to Know

The Assessment of Thoughtful Literacy in NAEP: Why the States Aren’t Measuring Up

            The articles indicate to me that the state tests do not adequately accurately measure student’s academic achievement. While the state has the burden of creating standardized tests across the state, teachers in the classroom have individual students each with their own set of intellectual abilities and learning preferences. So, in order to get a full understanding of each student’s strengths and weaknesses, various assessments must be administered. Data must be collected on the student using various forms of assessment that can inform the teacher of the student’s fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and language skills. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) created tests that showed to ask more critical thinking skills in contrast to the state test. Some of the skills highlighted in the NAEP assessment include the ability to interpret make inferences to ideas not explicitly mentioned in the text. Some of the questions on the state test do not allow the reader to fully interact with a reading selection, which has shown to improve comprehension. Items within a given reading selection may provide teachers with insight as to how students decode and comprehend text. Some of these items that aid in comprehension include: vocabulary knowledge, familiarity with genre, the organization of the text, characterization and details. From these, text organization and characterization types of questions have “the greatest potential to elicit thoughtful responses from readers” (Applegate, 2009). Open ended questions and those questions that require students compare/contrast characters, situations, conclusions and relate the reading material to their own experiences encourage students to engage in higher order thinking skills. Standardized state assessments contain a small percentage of open-ended questions in comparison to multiple-choice questions.

            In “Response to Intervention (RTI): What Teachers of Reading Need to Know”, the authors describe the differences between the standardized state tests and intervention strategies employed by classroom teachers. State tests can be effective assessments but classroom teachers need to employ strategies on a daily basis that will accurately measure students’ strengths and weaknesses. This data can help the classroom teacher to create an intervention strategy with set goals, tiered lesson plans and learning activities that can help with student’s individual needs. Monitoring progress is important as the strategy for each child will be different and ever changing, based upon the student’s response to the intervention strategies. Through shared information and collaboration with other teachers, intervention strategies are examined for effectiveness and revised if needed. Students who continue to struggle after receiving intervention strategies will receive additional instruction.

            These articles both highlight the need to offer various learning activities and assessments in the classroom. A standardized, one-size-fits-all approach in terms of assessment will not provide an accurate representation of each student’s strengths and weaknesses because it does not provide educators with details about the strategies students employ to acquire knowledge. One idea for classroom teachers is to create a file with various assessments that can be used to provide teachers with a comprehensive set of data to help with the creation of lesson plans. One question is: exactly what types of assessments should be included in such a profile?