Vocabulary Assessment

Vocabulary instruction and assessment is very important in literacy. Students need to identify low-frequency words and be able to use strategies in order to find the word's meanings. This will aid overall comprehension. Cloze passages are great to help students use the context to identify plausible words to fill in blanks within the passage.
The following sites will help you build custom cloze activities to meet the needs of your students.
Schoolhouse Tech: http://www.schoolhousetech.com/products/vocabulary/activities/cloze.aspx?gclid=CMDbzdaY_4wCFQrVOAodaCN_DQ;
Ed Helper: http://edhelper.com/cloze.htm;
Lake Munmorah Public School: http://www.lakemunmor-p.schools.nsw.edu.au/cloze/cloze.htm

Once you have modeled this with your students many times, you can use cloze passages to assess your student's vocabulary knowledge. The passage should be less than 250 words with certain vocabulary words missing for students to fill in. To increase reliability, the blank spaces should all be the same length.

Administering the assessment: Give the students the passage and the directions. This should not be a timed test. Encourage students to read the entire passage first, then use the context clues to help fill in the blanks.

Scoring the assessment: To score the Cloze passage, count only exact replacements. Do not count synonyms as correct. Do not penalize spelling errors. The raw score is the number of words that are correct. Use the raw score to find the student's percentage.

Cloze Scores:

Material is too easy Independent Level 90% and above
Material is about right Instructional Level 70-90%
Material is too difficult Frustration Level under 70%

The passage should be on the student's instructional level. Therefore, the passage may differ from student to student. This will really help give a clear picture of the misunderstandings students have about word meanings.

Have you used cloze passages for assessments? What are some pros and cons? What did you do with the information you gathered?

Great Site

I wanted to share a site with you that I found particularly interesting. The site's address is http://www.sedl.org/reading/rad/database.html. This site allows you to choose specific criteria in order to identify an assessment tool that best meets your need for assessing. For example, you can specify languages, ages, norm or criterion referenced tests or both, and knowledge domains that you want tested. This site then matches your criteria with the best assessments. The results tell you cost, time to administer, how to administer (group/ individual), grades used for, cognitive elements, subtests, languages, score reporting and test design data, and more. It can be very useful for individual use as well as school-wide use.

ISTAR

Our school does not give ISTAR assessments and I was curious as to what they entailed. ISTAR or Indiana Standards Tool for Alternate Reporting gives a clearer picture as to what high-end or low-end students are actually capable of in regards to achievement. Just like the name states, this is an alternate assessment component. Standardized tests cannot adequately measure those students whose scores are significantly higher or lower than grade-level. To ensure validity, accountability, and reliability of test scores, ISTAR is used to measure the progress of individual students within Indiana's assessment system. Students with disabilities, gifted/ talented students, and ELL students are most often administered this test.

The following was taken from the ISTAR website and defines ISTAR's intended purpose:(https://ican.doe.state.in.us/istar/istarmore.htm)

Identifying the baseline abilities of each student allows teachers to design curriculum specific to the individual needs of the student. Within ISTAR, each student is rated on appropriate educational standards, through the use of a three-point rubric. Teachers base their ratings on evidence such as observations, work samples, and portfolios. These ratings are tabulated to provide a score relative to the student's abilities, grade level, and individual progress from one year to the next.

Do you use this assessment at your school? How have the results helped shape your classroom instruction?

Assessments

In our school we currently use DIBELS as a huge part of our assessment piece to quickly assess students growth. We have created a data wall that quickly allows us to view students progress. There is a post-it for every child in grades k-3. After progress monitoring, we move the students to either green (meeting benchmark), yellow (close to benchmark), red (far below benchmark). This gives a clear picture of the students we really need to work with during interventions.

We also use DRA, ISTEP, Instructional Focus Assessments, and other assessments that vary across grade levels. What types of assessments are you using in your schools? Do you feel they are effective? Why/ why not? How do you use the information that is gathered from these assessments?