K-12 Academic Assessment Tools for Reading & Writing
Assessment is a requisite part of the teaching process, as without it, teachers cannot truly see how much their students have learned. When taking on the task of assessing reading and writing skills, teachers can use an assortment of tools. By selecting the assessment tool most appropriate to your students' age range, and engaging in assessment regularly, you can remain aware of your students' skills and ensure that you provide additional help where it is needed.
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Oral Reading Check
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As children begin to build their reading skills, oral reading checks often prove the most effective way to assess their reading abilities. When teaching elementary, or struggling middle and high school students, listen to your pupils read regularly. To assess their abilities, select pieces that are within their reading level and monitor how many words they mispronounce, how often they pause and how many times they need to ask for assistance. If the student makes more than two or three errors during his oral reading of grade-appropriate text, he may have a fluency issue.
Cloze Activity
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A cloze activity is a popular reading ability test, used most often in elementary school but on occasion in middle and high schools. To create a cloze, take a chunk of text from a grade-appropriate source. Re-type the text, removing every fifth, sixth or seventh word and putting a blank where the word was. Without providing a word bank, ask the students to fill in the blanks, using their decoding skills and context clues to determine what logically could fit. When reading grade-appropriate text, a student should be able to fill in the cloze blanks with no more than three errors.
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Comprehension Questions
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As students develop their reading skills, emphasis turns from being able to complete the task of reading to being able to understand what was read. In middle and high schools, comprehension questions often take the place of standard reading observations, as the most important thing at this level is that students comprehend the written words. Present your students with comprehension questions at the conclusion of a reading passage to assess their understanding of the print text.
Rubric
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When it comes time to assess writing, a rubric is often the easiest way to make the process quantifiable. This tool is used across the board from K-12 with the complexity varying to suit student abilities. To prepare a rubric, decide upon categories to assess. Place these categories on a sheet, attaching point values to each. After reading the student's work, give him a set amount of points out of the points possible in each category depending upon how well he did in each section.
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