LING 612 Ch 6 Writing Assessment(1996) by O'Malley & Pierce

Writing assessment focus is mainly on the role of the writer, purpose of writing, and writing modifications. Self and peer assessment are key roles in that process. Students can write for their purposes and get feedback on the process.
When my students are first beginning to write, they write exactly like they would if they are recording their transcriptions of stories. Students voice can be heard in the style that their voice comes across. After the transition from pictures to words with pictures, I can see my student's writing developed in their sentences. Some are personal stories, some are about an activity that they participated in such as a boat ride to fish camp or hunting. The stories are dictated and very long. Kids have no problem telling the stories for someone else to record. Once they are in charge of their own words on the paper, they begin to see writing as a difficult process. I am hoping to find ways to help ease that transition for my students to become confident writers.
I hope to implement the process where students go through the process writing beginning on pg. 138 where they do prewriting, writing, postwriting, and conferencing. This can be a discussion about the topic and what they will choose to write about.
Scoring rubrics come in handy at this point, such as Figure 6.1 Holistic Scoring Rubric for Writing Assessment with ELL Students that can show you where your students are at in a glance. My K-1 students will generally be in levels 1 and 2, but it is also a great idea to show them where they will eventually end up as they learn the writing process. This is a great idea for motivation purposes and gets students hooked on writing.
Writing assessments are a great instruction guide. I would love to have a rubric posted and have my students understand the writing process to self-assess and help their peers with the writing process. The more students are exposed to the writing process, the better writers they become. I enjoy hearing my students tell each other about their journals. I am also interested in writing in other content areas and connecting them to our daily lessons in reading,writing, math, and employability skills.

LING 612 Ch 10 Reading Assessment and Instruction by Peregoy, S. & Boyle, O. (2005)

This chapter does a wonderful job of explaining that if assessment is multidimensional, then you and your students have a better opportunity to show progress in more ways. I liked the Figure 10.1 that has a instructional cycle that has these components, assess, instruct based on assessment, re-evaluate, instruct. This cycle is repeated until students are ready to move on to another level.
For non-native English speakers, it is recommended that you find out information about student's prior knowledge, purpose for reading, language knowledge and their prior literacy experiences both in their first language as well as in English. You also have to look at the student's background knowledge which is finding out if they use their background knowledge when they read, language knowledge which is their miscue analysis, word recognition and if they understand the words they are reading, vocabulary in speaking, reading and writing, and comprehension which includes the different levels such as independent, instructional, and frustration from the text that they are reading.
From the informal reading inventories, I find myself using echo reading where you or a tape reads and children echo back the same phrases or sentences. I also use guided reading when I have both my kindergarten and first grade students for my guided reading group. The level of difficulty depends on the students and what lessons I want to emphasize.
I also am a big fan of read alouds and introducing silent sustained reading to my first grade group. They enjoy reading texts and we read books that are at all levels, but mostly focusing on the frustration levels, just to work together through the passages.

LING 612 Reading Assessment Ch 5 by O'Malley & Pierce (1996)

I am pleased to say that I am starting to figure out how to assess and use reading activities as assessment tools to show progress. If I want to test students on retell, I provide retell activities for the students to utilize and they also get lessons on how to practice that skill. Everyday reading experiences should include a variety of methods to help students learn to decode and comprehend their reading assignments. Books should be provided for students to explore their interests and anyone can be included in the process of reading, whether it be a parent, teacher, peer, family member, elder or a toy such a toy or snow machine. Kids have great imaginations to create different settings for them to enjoy literature.
Assessment is a tool to help students, parents and teachers learn about the process that students are going through to learn to read. Students that are English language learners are going to have trouble connecting to the mainstream America's genre of reading, but that does not mean that they will not be able to catch up. It takes second language learners an average of 5-7 years to become proficient in a language. During that time, they can read books that they select and ones that they show interest in.
Teacher's roles as data collectors should provide a variety of assessment tools. The chapter has a lot of reading assessment ideas that you can use or adapt for your particular setting. I am going to try to get more familiar with figure 5.20 on pg 126 to get quality information of what is happening with individual student reading strategies and record that in a portfolio that I will use to share with the student, other teachers and parents.
I had a hard time keeping a portfolio in the past because I just saw it as a collection of work that had no meaning to my students but the idea was my own and only I understood it without providing rubics, checklists or other types of documents that helped others who look at the portfolio understand it. I am pleasantly surprised at my alternative approach to the concept of portfolio in the classroom as a teaching and recording tool for both my students and myself.

Assessing Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (2005) By R. Rhodes, S.H. Ochoa, & S. Ortiz

Special Education placement for ethnic and second language learners in the United States has issues to consider to make sure that students who are limited English proficient are not diagnosed as needing special services because of bias and language issues referred to as disproportionality. There has been a study of the past 20 years or so of placement in special education dealing with minority students in various states and the findings suggest that there are more variable to investigate such as instructional factors that affect the quality of the school and teacher experience, referral procedures which are biased toward minorities and lack of prereferral intervention, assessment practices which points out that many school psychologists are not trained to test culturally and linguistically different student populations, and noncompliance with state and/or federal guidelines which assesses linguistically diverse students to be tested in their first language.
With school accountability such a high factor for success of schools, minority students have a greater "one size fits all" approach and therefore being labeled special ed and therefore exempt from the high stakes tests. This also affects promotion and graduation for the minority students, hense the high drop out rate.
Some solutions from the National Research Council (NRC) recommends a "universal screening program" (p.38) which is administered when students show signs of having difficulty in reading. Some factors that would address if bias is a factor is a longitudinal data consisting of how long a family has lived in the US, level of acculturation, birth place of the students, parents, grandparents and their language proficiency. Provide access to bilingual education, bilingual psychologists, and the language of the tests being in the minority student's Native Language.
Funding would also be provided to evaluate assessment methods used for culturally and linguistically diverse students and testing to see if bias is the main reason students are placed in special education.
I am pleased to read that the NRC is taking steps to help students with cultural and linguistic differences be included in the regular classroom and also have access to the gifted end of the special services spectrum.

Dynamic Assessment in the Language Classroom (2005) by Poehner & Lantolf

Dynamic Asssessment (DA) applies Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (ZPD) to help second language learners achieve instruction from assessment assistance and teaching forward to eventually develop background knowledge for students to work on tasks independently. This ZPD approach helps educators to use the student's maturity level to teach skills ahead of time therefore assisting students to learn "when they are ready", in the famous words of Walkie Charles.
DA pedagogical approach is different from formative assessment where scaffolding is used as a possible teaching strategy to help with assessment feedback.
One key term that I read about was Vygotsky's approach to DA, interactionist which is focused on learning over measurement approach. The other approach which is not the focus of the paper is interventionist focusing on a "different score." The interactionist approach has its roots on what the student's potential can be with interaction and focus on student performance.
Basically what I got out of the article was that teaching a student or group of students based on their understanding of the test while they are testing or afterwards, and helping the students self correct is the goal of moving forward. Teachers can focus their feedback for students to develop their understanding of the assessment and thereby giving the student lessons that they are ready for to apply later and to eventually work independently on later based on their ZPD.
My comment on the article is that if we use DA in the classroom to make assessments developmentally appropriate, where does that fit in the limited English Proficient guideline on how to assist language learners with the high stakes test? And if not, how can it not be a factor to discuss and bring up to the state accomodations board?

LING 612 Ch 3 Portfolio Assessment by O'Malley & Pierce (1996)

Chapter three of the O'Malley & Pierce text almost had me thinking that I was going to finally learn how to create and gather information for my assessment portfolio. At this point in the class, I am sold on the type of portfolio I want to create with my students and share the process with the elementary team. Since we already have a portfolio going in writing using the six traits rubric, I thought this would be a great addition using reading to start. I agree with the concept of the student being in charge of their self-assessment and goal setting. I was trying to to figure out how to incorporate the essential elements of the portfolio including samples of student work, student self-assessment and clear stated criteria. In the samples of student work, I want to include how students learn to read and the concepts of print they are applying. I also want to show students their growth over time with their writing. And how they are learning their numbers to apply to addition and subtraction. Maybe this is a huge task, but I remember the whole language approach that we had our content curriculum in the early 1990's. I was told to use portfolios but I never got the training that I needed to get started, so all the work I included in the portfolio folder was work that I thought were showing growth over time in writing and math. I still do not think that is the process to learn how to create and develop authentic assessment and portfolios can be done by given samples and ideas, rather it should be a staff development idea that we need to be trained on and see the process from start to finish, perferably an end product that we can show our students and jump right into teaching and developing the process for incorporating porfolios as a part of the classroom routine.
At this point I am processing how students select their work. There are three kinds of self-assessment which include documentation which contains their best work, comparision which they look at their work and compare it with work done in the past, and integration which showcases their growth in oral and written language.
In the section where the student and teacher works on clearly stated criteria, I am not able to see how my Kindergarten students can come up with goals to set for themselves and how it would be incorporated in my classroom (pg. 36). I have learned the hard way not to jump into new material without getting training on how to use an assessment tool in my classroom. I am not hestitant to learn new things, but I am hestitant to waste my time and confuse my students while I am trying to figure out how to use resources that are manditory or required but forgetting to give me mini lessons on how to develop a resource.
I am having high hopes that I will learn how to create an authentic assessment that includes assessment porfolios and I can use the resource and help the rest of the teachers in my site use this assessment tool. I am especially interested in creating authentic assessment in oral and written language and find ways to include it without spending endless hours trying to figure out the process on my own, without knowing what I am trying to gain in the process.