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?