Staff Workshop Teacher Handout: Assessing Young Children's Literacy Development

From Learning to Read and Write: Developmentally Appropriate Practices for Young Children by Susan B. Neuman, Carol Copple, and Sue Bredekamp (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2000)

• PRINT
• EMAIL

Knowing what to do and how to support children's learning requires informed instructional decision making and a plan of action. This is the heart of assessment, i "the process of observing, recording, and otherwise documenting work that children do and how they do it." Effective assessment makes it possible for teachers to:

• monitor and document children's progress over time
• ensure that instruction is responsive and matched appropriately to what children are and are not able to do
• customize instruction to meet individual children's strengths and development
• enable children to observe their own growth and development
• identify children who might benefit from more intensive levels of instruction, such as individual tutoring or other interventions.

Teaching and assessment are complementary processes; one activity informs the other. The following principles should be considered in designing an assessment program.

• Assessment should support children's development and literacy learning. Assessment helps identify children's strengths, needs, and progress toward specific learning goals. It may also document who might benefit from special help or need more academically challenging material.
• Assessment should take many different forms. Good assessment uses a variety of tools, including collections of children's work (drawings, paintings, writing) and records of conversations and interviews with children. The core of assessment is daily observation. Watching children's ongoing life in the classroom enables teachers to capture children's performance in real activities rather than those contrived to isolate specific skills.
• Assessment must avoid cultural bias. Children from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds have varied experiences and styles of learning. When planning assessment, and when interpreting and reporting results to others, these factors need to be carefully considered. Some children will be further along the literacy continuum than others who may need more time, more one-to-one instruction, and more practice. At the same time, it is important to ensure that all children gain similar standards of learning and performance.
• Assessment should encourage children to observe and reflect on their own learning process. Asking for children's input can be a key factor in helping them learn and take ownership of their successes. Ideally, since teaching and learning are collaborative processes, children need to feel like insiders rather than outsiders, as if assessment is something the teacher "does" to them.
• Assessment should shed light on what children are able to do well in addition to the areas where they need further work. Focusing on what children are able to do to help them extend what they know builds confidence and motivation for learning to read. Children are able to progress more readily in an atmosphere in which mistakes are viewed as ways to learn rather than failures to be avoided. And when teachers understand the abilities of their learners better, it becomes much easier to decide which new literacy experiences should be offered to help them develop further. This is a constructive way of literacy learning for teachers and children.

ASSESSMENT PROCEDURES

Teachers today have an overwhelming array of techniques that can be used in the assessment process. Some of these instruments involve formal assessment procedures such as standardized tests. These formal measures tend to focus on comparing children's reading performance and are typically used for accountability purposes.

The primary purpose of another set of assessment methods, described as informal or authentic, is to help teachers understand what children are able to do and to provide meaningful instruction. These assessments demand greater teacher knowledge and interpretation, but the depth and specificity of the information that is learned is worth the effort. Here are examples of some of the most common informal assessment procedures.

Anecdotal notes

Observations about children's literacy in action can provide powerful and reliable information to teachers. Ideally, teachers schedule a time every day to focus on particular children and make brief logs or anecdotal notes about the children's involvement in literacy events. Different language and literacy contexts are examined, such as one-- to-one interactions, small-group discussions, and large-class settings with the focus always being on what children are actually doing as they read and write.

Narratives

Narratives help tell a story about a learning experience for or by children. Their purpose is to make visible to others change and growth in a child's knowledge. Story readings

When teachers ask children to retell a story after having read or listened to one, they gain important information about language and literacy development. Children's understandings of stories can be determined through an analysis of their knowledge of characters, settings, story events, and outcomes.

Writing folders

Records of children's writings at various stages, kept in writing folders, may be used for many purposes. Teachers can examine children's understanding of stories, their spelling development, and their developing concepts of print. They can also ask children about their personal reflections about any piece they have completed.

Instructional conversations

Conversations with children about their favorite stories, TV programs, or activities outside school help teachers understand children's interests, motivation to learn, and self-perceptions as literacy learnings.

Emergent-storybook readings

Teachers can learn about children's concepts of print by observing and asking questions during a shared book activity or when reading one-on-one with them. Common questions, such as, "What tells the story?" (the picture or the print) or "Where does the story begin?" (directionality, moving from left to right), and instructions, "Point with your finger as I read the words," provide important information about children's understanding of print conventions.

ORGANIZING AND REPORTING ASSESSMENT INFORMATION

Many separate pieces of information and work samples can make it hard to see the forest for the trees and get a coherent picture of children's progress toward becoming readers and writers. Therefore, it is critical to organize these materials in a way that is useful for planning instruction.

Portfolios are a helpful way of organizing various examples of children's work and progress. Artists use portfolios to demonstrate their skills and achievements; teachers can use portfolios to portray the literacy work and progress of each student over a period of time. Typically they include samples of children's writings, story retellings, interests, reading logs, and so forth, that the teacher and child have chosen.

Multiple strategies are used to assess and document children's progress in learning-for instance, project narratives, child self-reflections, and developmental checklists. Using a range of these strategies helps to capture the different contexts in which children learn and their various kinds of learning and development to create an integrated portrait of the child as a literacy learner.

HOW ASSESSMENT BENEFITS YOUNG CHILDREN

Teachers need to know as much as possible about the children in their program. In order to plan activities that are useful and interesting to the group as a whole, tailor instruction to meet individual needs, and design challenging and achievable curriculum. Teachers, administrators, parents, policymakers, all of us need to keep in mind that language and literacy assessment is a means and not an end in itself. As such, it must be undertaken and conducted by responsible and informed adults for children's benefit, with the ultimate goal of assisting them to become lifelong literacy learners.

Staff Workshop Teacher Handout: "Learning to Read and Write - Developmentally Appropriate Practices for Young Children"
Classrooms that provide children with regular opportunities to express themselves on paper, without worrying about correct spelling and proper handwriting, also help children understand that writing has real purposes. In this Teacher Handout, developmentally appropriate practices for young children in reading and writing are discussed.

Staff Workshop Teacher Handout: Young Children as Competent Communicators
If we believe that helping children develop strong language skills is the core of the early childhood curriculum, we can ensure that every aspect of classroom life is saturated with natural language. And we can provide opportunities for children to speak, experiment, and play with language.

Staff Workshop Teacher Handout: Assessment and Early Literacy
Jones highlights developing strategies for monitoring and assessing children's literacy development. For more information, see the related activities, and Workshop Instructions linked to the main article page.