cait_journal2

Cait Benson February 9, 2009 EDC 452 Assessment Journal # 2 According to my cooperative teacher, the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) takes place several times each year. The first time it occurs is when each student enters a new grade in September while the second time it occurs is in February. The DRA measures the reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension of all students in each grade. In this case, the DRA was completed in my cooperative teacher’s fifth grade class. This assessment is completed both student to teacher (one-on-one) and alone and the results are beneficial for both the teacher and the state. To start, each student was required to silently complete a student reading survey. This survey included various questions about reading preference and skills in order to get to know and understand each individual child. Some of the questions asked students about their favorite book, their strengths and weaknesses in reading, and their future coals in reading. After the students finished the survey alone, the teacher was able to meet with each student at her desk one by one. I observed the teacher assessing a young boy in her classroom. After the child was seated, he was allowed to choose one of the provided short stories. Once the story was chosen, the teacher started her stopwatch and listened inventively as the child read aloud the first section. While listening for accurate pronunciation of each word, the teacher also listened for expression and phrasing during the read aloud (this is partially what she would be assessing this student on). After the child completed the oral reading section of this assessment, he was sent back to his desk to complete the comprehension section individually. The comprehension section asked students to predict what could occur in the following pages and summarize the story so far. Once the student was finished with the final section, the teacher was then able to assess that child by reviewing the scores during the oral reading and the comprehension section. The teacher evaluated the student using a rubric that was scored, intervention (low), instructional, independent, and advanced (high). Since this assessment is confidential, I was unable to view the results of this student’s assessment. Although this assessment is mandatory at this school because of its beneficial results, I definitely believe I will incorporate some of its methods into my classroom, whether the assessment is required where I teach or not. Perhaps I will chose my own short stories that I want the students to read aloud to me and score them accordingly. With that, I could also ask students to fill out a reading survey at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year to see how each individual has grown and changed in reading preference. I can certainly see myself keeping these pieces of evidence on file throughout the entire school year. I feel that having a record of the student’s reading interests and level throughout the year is essential to seeing growth and progress. As we’ve learned in class, having records to refer back to during the year is not only beneficial to me, the teacher, but also to the parents and the student. In addition to this, I believe this assessment is effective in the classroom because it measures or evaluates several different skills simultaneously (accuracy, fluency, and comprehension). Continuing from this, this assessment also calls for a higher level of thinking because it requires the students to evaluate themselves during the student survey and to create a summary of the entire short story rather than to just simply answer multiple choice questions. Overall, I definitely feel that this DRA is an effective way of assessing a student and I can see myself using it in my future class.

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