Castangozzi_Jorunal+09

Maria Castagnozzi Assessment 2 The other day when I went to class I was very excited to get to give my students a performance assessment. While my teacher had the class doing a little reading and drawing a picture of what they have read, she asked if I would call students one by one over to her desk to give them a dolce list assessment. What a dolce list is, is just a list of words that they should be able to read. They take a list home and practice with their parents and then every week they get tested to see if they know them. After they know most of their dolce words they can move up to a higher set of dolce words. As I called students over I sat them down beside me and I gave them a list of their words. I had another piece of paper in my hand with the same set of words. I instructed the children to read the list of words and that I couldn’t give them any help. If they didn’t know a word I told them it was ok and to just skip that word and move on to the next one. When they got a word wrong I would put an “x” on the corresponding word on my paper. At the end I tallied the number wrong and would decide if they got to move up or not to the next set. I thought this was a very good assessment. I noticed some children flying through their words, and some had a little bit more trouble. There were a few students who had been on the same set of words for a few weeks now and when my teacher asked if they were practicing at home with their parents, they hesitantly shook their heads no. My teacher then instructed them to practice more so they could move on to the next list. I noticed some students flew through the words making careless mistakes. I’m thinking they either weren’t paying full attention or they guessed another word by the looks of it, for example maybe the word three looks like tree so they would say tree instead of three. Overall I think this was a good assessment. I learned a lot when testing each child, because it gave me an estimate on their reading skills. These weekly performance assessments not only expand the children’s reading and word recognition skills, but it helps the teacher understand where their students are in their ability to read a common base of words.


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