ASSESSING READING

The classic principles of classroom assesment apply to your attempt to assess reading comprehension be specific about which micro or macro (skill) are you assessing; identify the genre of written communication that is being evaluated; and choose carefully among among the ranges of possibelities from simply preceiving letters or words all the way to extensive reading; in addition, for assesing reading, some attention should given to the highly strategic nature of reading comprehension by accounting for which of the many strategis for reading are being examined.

Finally, reading assesment implies differentiating bottom up from bottom down task, as well as on from versus focus on meaning.

In your efforts to design test at any one or a combination of these levels and catagories, consider to following classification of tasks. These are not meant to be exhaustive, but reather to provide an overview of some possibilities.

1)      Perceptive Reading (recognition of symbols, letter, words)

-          Reading aloud

-          Copying (reproduce in writing)

-          Multiple choice registration (incluiding true false in the blank)

-          Picture identification

2)      Selective Reading (focus on morphology, grammar, lexicon)

-          Multiple choice grammar/vocabulary task

-          Contextualized multiple choice (within a short paragraph)

-          Sentence level close task

-          Matching task

-          Grammar/vocabulary editing task (multiple choice)

-          Picture and task (chode graphic)

-          Gape filling task (e.g. sentence competition)

3)      Integrative Reading (requiring knowledge)

-          Reading comprehension

-          Dicaourse editing task (multilple choice)

-          Scanning

-          Responding to charts, mapsm graps and diagram.

4)      Extensive Reading

Extensive reading is a key to student gains in reading ability, linguistic competence, vocabulary, spelling and writing.

-          Skimming

-          Summarizing

-          Responding to reading thtough short essay

-          Not talking, marginal notes

-          Outlining

1.      Fluency Assessment

The ability to measure student’s level of achievment in fluency and monitor their progress is key to successful fluency teaching. Teacher needs to able t measure the effectiveness of their instruction in fluency; to do this, they need ways to assess student fluency validly and affeciently.

The first ways is fluency accessment have to have some degree of reability and validity. Users of the assessment must be assured that the result they obtain are reliable thet the result will provide consistent measures of fluency and will not vary beacause of imperfections in thr assessment it self. Users have to also be assured that the assessments are valid, that they actually measure reading fluency.

Second, the assessment have to be effecient in administration, scoring and interpretation. Assessment should as quick as and easy to use as possible. Since current views suggest that reading fluency consist of three distintion compenents, this blocket aligns its approach to assessment whit these components.

a.       Decoding accuracy – the abiltiy of readers to decode words accurately intext.

b.      Automaticity – the ability of readers to decode words in text with minimal use of intentional resources.

c.       Prosody – the ability of readers to appropriately use pharsing and expression to convey meaning.

2.      Assesing accuracy and automaticity in reading.

Fluency has decoding accuracy component. That is the ability of readers to decode text accurately. Fluency also has a decoding automaticity component, that meant the ability of readers to decode words with minimal use of attention resources. These two aspects of fluency are reflected in reader’s level of accuracy in decoding words and their speed of reading automaticity as measured by the reading rate.

Accuray is determined by precentage of words a reader can read correctly, it has been shown to be a valid measure of reading profiently. We can see the levels od accuracy in reading below.

Levels of peformance for word decoding accuracy

Dependent level	97 – 100 %
Instructional level	90 – 96 %
Frustation level	< 90 %

Ø  Readers who able to read the assessment text or other text of similiar difficulty without assisstance are in the 97 – 100 % ranger/score (independent level).

Ø  Readers who score within the 90 – 96 % range (instruction level) are able to read the assessment text or other text of similiar difficulity with some assistance, usually provided by a techer or parents.

Ø  Readers who scores below 90& in word accuracy (frustation level) find the assessment text or other of similiar difficulty too chalenging to read even with assisstance.

Reading assessment that imclude accuracy and rate provide teachers with a workable and valid approach to documenting student performance and progress align well with other, more comprehensive measures. Moreover, they can guide teacher’s instruction to meet student’s specific needs. Students who performs poorly on the assessment can be identified for more and comprehensive reading assessment.

3.      Assessing Prosodic Reading

The third componen of fluency, prosodic or expressive reading is more directly related to comprehension. Fluency is often decribed by the extend to which appropriate expression and phrasing can be heard in a person’s voice when reading aloud. Fluent readers embed prosodic or melodic features of spokern language, like stress, pitch variations, intonations, rate, phrasing, and pausing in their voice.

This embedding of prosody shows that the reader is trying t make sense of or comprehend the text. Expressive reading happens once a degree of automaticaly is established, and expression is one way in which a eading constructs meaing while reading. Students need opportunities to try out their  voices on different passages, and to read passages in different ways to express the obvisious as well as the more subtle meaning intended by the authot.

Assessing student’s oral interpretive reading is a key to developing their prosodic or expressive reading competencies.

4.      Another ways that we used as reading assessment of different set of features:

a.       We computed contours for latency, duration and intensity, not just pitch.

b.      We computed pitch variability as standard devitiation between high and low values which out       liers can distort.

c.      We computed the latency preceding each word, and their sum as reading time, both absolute and normalized by word lenghth as time per letter, not just the absolute duration of pauses between sentences at phrase final commas and in mid phrase intructions.