Assessment

Assessment, which can be highly general or highly specific, includes all techniques used to better understand a student's current learning levels for both skills and subject matter content. Assessment can be as simple as a teacher's judgment based on observations of student performance, or as complex as a five-hour test.

Educators, parents and policy makers should make judgments about student achievement through comparisons over a period of time. These judgments affect decisions about grades, advancement, placement, instructional needs, and curriculum. Good assessment information provides accurate measures of student performance and enables teachers or other decision-makers to make instructional decisions. A detailed analysis of various reading assessments can be found at http://IDEA.uoregon.edu. Assessment Kits are available through PaTTAN's Short Term Loan Program.

The Four Types of Assessments

• Outcome Assessments: These assessments are used to determine whether students have achieved grade-level or proficiency standard performance.
• Screening Assessment: These quick, easily administered assessments are used to identify those students who are at-risk for reading difficulties.
• Progress Monitoring Assessments: These assessments are used to ensure that students are making adequate reading progress. They must be easily administered and sensitive to growth over short instructional intervals. These assessments quickly determine the need for instructional change when progress is not at the expected level.
• Diagnostic Assessments: These in-depth assessments determine a student's specific instructional needs and what and how much intervention may be required. They measure the component skills of reading, and determine where in the scope and sequence of those skills the student falls.

The Pennsylvania Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Standards provide the target for all assessment and instruction in education.

Reading Assessment
Current research indicates that waiting to identify reading failure by using an end-of-third-grade assessment places students at risk for never becoming proficient readers. Early and repeated screening and assessments of reading skills allows for early response to students who are in need of more intensive support, students who are at-risk of reading failure.