S4 Ep13 - Let's Talk Year 3-6 Reading Assessment and Grading

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Hi there. Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast recoded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. I’m Jocelyn and I want to say a huge hello to all teachers and leaders grappling with assessment and reporting. Last episode of the podcast, I shared a perspective on reporting and grading early years reading without a benchmark assessment. In the old days, we assessed students, looked at the level and then used that to determine what A-E grade students received in their report for reading. This process was used across the school. With the shift to structured approaches to literacy, the whole question of assessment and grading has been called into question, but we haven’t yet reached the point where we've comfortably moved to a new understanding as a profession.

One thing that we can be sure of is that reading assessments, where we listen to students read from an unseen text has never been aligned with the requirements of our curriculum. We just thought that they were. So, when we consider the assessment and grading of reading, whether it’s early years or upper primary, we have to turn to the achievement standard for our state’s curriculum.

In today’s episode, I’ll be sharing some guidance and suggestions to bring clarity around grading and reporting reading in Years 3-6. If you teach Foundation-Year 2, by all means, have a listen to this episode, but you'll find specific guidance for your grades in the previous one.

As with the early years, reading in Years 3-6 can be considered in two sections:

The reading students do themselves, were they lift the words from the page (or we could call this the bottom of Scarborough's Rope) and

The thinking about texts that happens as you teach your text-based units (we could think about this as relating more to the top of Scarborough's Rope).

In the early years, these things sit quite separately as children are learning to lift words from the page. In Years 3-6 though, they're much more connected and this is appropriate.

The elements of reading interact, they don’t sit separately.

Learning more vocabulary makes you a better decoder.

Lifting words from the page more efficiently helps you comprehend with greater depth.

But when we assess and grade, we have to separate things out or the whole thing becomes unworkable and we end up back where we were with benchmark assessments of some sort, asking students questions about the unseen texts, not having any idea whether or not they have the background knowledge and vocab to understand what they're reading.

So, let’s take a look at the Australian Curriculum achievement standards for Year 3-6 and the particular nuances that can help us make decisions.

If you are teaching in a state that does not use the Australian Curriculum directly, still have a listen and take the points that I'm making and have the questions in mind as you approach your own state's curriculum.

In the episode for Foundation-Year 2, I suggested that a great activity for your team could be to break your grade’s achievement standard down into a series of ‘I can’ statements. Resource Room members have a set already available, but there is virtue in doing the thinking that creating your own entails. It’s in considering the statements and rumbling with differences in perception that we grow and deepen our understandings collectively. So don’t shy away from work like this. It’s really valuable. Just remember that while ever there is disagreement, there needs to be more talking and more learning. Differences in viewpoint are not an indication of one person being right and good and another person being wrong and bad, but a chance to learn more and ask better questions.

Let’s begin with the achievement standard for Year 3 and 4. The elements of the achievement standards related to reading for Year 3 and 4 are almost identical. Of course, the content descriptors vary from year to year, but the standards themselves for reading vary only in a little bit of wording. This is particularly true for the elements that relate to the top of Scarborough’s Rope. The two statements that relate to the bottom of the rope, or how the students lift the words from the page, are:

Year 3: They read fluently, using phonic, morphemic and grammatical knowledge to read multisyllabic words with more complex letter patterns.

Year 4: They read fluently and accurately, integrating phonic, morphemic, grammatical and punctuation knowledge.

Now there’s a slight difference in the wording, but they mean pretty much the same thing.

For an understanding of nuance between the two standards, we could have a look at the content descriptors but, I’m afraid to say, that there isn’t much help there when it comes to those elements of lifting words from the page.

So, we can drill down further using the general capabilities.

So that can be a general guide: when the curriculum itself is not specific enough, go to the general capabilities.

The Fluency section for Year 3 says:

• Reads aloud a range of moderately complex texts with fluency and phrasing, adjusting pace, volume, pitch and pronunciation to enhance meaning and expression
• Varies pace according to purpose and audience

And for Year 4 it says:

• Reads aloud a range of complex and highly complex texts which include multisyllabic words and complex sentences with fluency and appropriate expression
• Consistently and automatically integrates pausing, intonation, phrasing and rate

The main difference between these two is the description of texts in that Year 3 indicates a moderately complex text and Year 4 a range of complex and highly complex texts.

Now, the most logical question to ask now is, What on earth is the difference between a moderately complex, complex and highly complex text? 

Does ACARA give us examples? No. Of course not! Don’t be silly.

What they do give us is an appendix at the end of the general capabilities document that contains a description of the features of each type of text.

I've had a go at creating a couple of texts that reflect the features of a moderately complex and complex text as described in the general capabilities. It's just me having a stab at seeing, Can we put some content understanding into defining what these texts are?

The way that I would use these texts is as an oral fluency measure after teaching a text-based unit, in this case, “The Velveteen Rabit”.

This would mean that I knew that the students had background knowledge for the text to be able to understand what was happening. I’d be using the text-based unit for the text-related features that make up most of the achievement standard about reading. This includes things like discussing characters, events and text structures. I would then use the Hasbrouck Tindall norms as an indicator of reading rate and accuracy and make notes about phrasing and expression as I listened to the students read. In this way, we’d be covering all the bases for the achievement standard, you can actually ask them some comprehension-related questions. The questions only pose a problem when we don't know whether the students have the vocab and background knowledge to be able to answer them.

But what about our normed tools? Where does it leave them? Do we still need them? Well, yes, we do. Normed tools such as DIBELS and Acadience are screeners to ensure that we are identifying students who need additional support and are providing that support. They are not methods of assessing for reporting. So, both forms of assessment are necessary and they each have their place. 

It’s reasonable to ask the question, “Can we just use our normed screener for the reading rate part?” I think that’s a decision for your school to make in conjunction with your system’s curriculum advisors. When I look at the texts for the end of Year 4 for example, from one of those normed tools, they do seem to reflect the expectations for moderately complex and complex text as described in the Australian Curriculum in many ways, but not all.

These expectations include things like:

• A range of synonyms and antonyms with subtle shades of meaning
• Technical and learning area–specific words and phrases
• Words with multiple connotations or meaning
• Figurative language
• Common idiomatic language
• Words that are used ironically to create humour
• Complex sentences with several subordinate phrases or clauses
• Extended noun groups
• Complex punctuation.

So those normed texts, they do give a nod in that direction, but looking at that list, I'm not sure whether or not, and I'm genuinely not prepared to make a call here, about whether or not that meets all of that criteria. I would love it if ACARA could provide more guidance and in fact provide an exemplar text to help us know what we're looking at. We may find after that that truly the text from those norms assessments actually get the job done.

The purpose of this episode is not to give you a definitive answer about assessment and reporting, I don't have any secret knowledge that you don't, but to help you and your team make connections between the tools you have at hand and the curriculum. As with the episode about the early years, while we can find connections between normed tools and curriculum expectations, it’s important to remember that the two have not been written to align.

While I think that we can recognise that achieving the 50th percentile for correct words per minute using a text from our normed screener may be one piece of the grading puzzle for reading in Year 3 and 4, we can’t say, “The student achieved benchmark on the normed screener so they get a C" or "They achieved above benchmark on the screener so they get a B.” There is so much more to the achievement standard than this. Most of it is about the interactions that you have through your text-based unit.

When it comes to Year 5 and 6, the achievement standards step away from students reading fluency completely. While the standards say, ‘they read, view and comprehend texts’, they do not refer to accuracy, fluency or how students tackle lifting words from the page at all. It seems to me that the assumption is that at this point, students can read, as in lift words from the page and that no further development in this area is expected beyond grade 4. Now, that doesn't make sense, but it's what we have. In fact, the fluency section of the general capabilities ends at grade 4, as does phonics and word knowledge. It’s not that students don’t need to read texts in Year 5 and 6, but rather the focus of instruction and reporting switches completely to understanding and thinking about texts. This means that the text-based unit carries all of the weight of the reading grade for reporting. So that unit has to be really robust.

The question that I’m sure some listeners are asking is, if the curriculum makes no mention of reading fluency and word-level knowledge, does that mean a student can achieve a C for reading in Year 5-6 even if they can’t decode those moderately complex and complex texts themselves? For my money, the answer has to be no.

If a student has not yet reached the appropriate progression point in the general capability for reading fluency that is 1 or 2 grades before their current grade, they can’t possibly have a C for reading in Year 5-6. With support to access texts, they may well be able to demonstrate learning in all of the comprehension aspects of the achievement standard, but they aren’t demonstrating what the curriculum implies, in that they aren’t actually reading for themselves. Of course, your school and system will have a particular view on this and you should follow that lead, I'm just sharing my views here.

For me, if a student cannot read a complex or moderately complex text on their own, they can’t fully demonstrate what is outlined in the achievement standard, it's that simple. It might feel rough to take this stance, but here’s another way to think about it: giving students C’s in Year 5 and 6 for reading, when they can’t actually read, only serves to mask the difficulty that they are having. The teacher the next year gets the report or looks at the marks and says Oh, they got a C, so they're on track, when they're actually not. That also happens when they go off into high school. There's no indication here that the student's going to need more adjustment if they don't have a set of documents to say so.

We often want to give Cs because we feel bad or we haven’t set assessment tasks up well and now can’t tell the difference between the students marks, that's a whole 'nother issue. But fake grades don’t help anyone, least of all the students.

If the achievement standard doesn’t mention reading fluency, should we still complete normed text-level reading screeners in Years 5 and 6? Doesn't say it. Is it a waste of time to do those assessments in year five and six? No, it's not a waste of time and yes, we should be doing them.

Remember, the purpose of these screeners is to help us identify students who are at risk for reading failure so that we can intervene and provide appropriate support. Just because a student scraped in with at-benchmark in Year 4 doesn't mean they're going to stay there for Year 5 just because they got older.

I’m going to say it again. These screeners are not designed to help us write reports.

Are there any parts of the normed screener that can be used to help us report for Year 5 and 6? Well, when you look at the achievement standard, no. The whole achievement standard for reading in Year 5 and 6 is about understanding and analysing texts and just isn’t the purpose. The whole achievement standard for reading in Years 5 and 6 is about understanding and analysing text, and this just isn't the purpose of those screeners. And this comes about through engaging with rich literature and a wide variety of texts to think about and respond to. 

If you and your team are grappling with the complexity of grading and reporting for reading, you are not alone. Let me summarise my suggestions from this and the previous episode:

1.

Take the time to work together to turn the achievement standard into simple I can statements for your grade. When you are unsure of what it means, drill down into the content descriptors and if that's still not clear, drill down into the general capabilities In the Australian Curriculum website. When you click through to the elaborations, you can also click through to the general capabilities, so you don't have to know that massive document really well. The website will help you get there. The clarity you gain from this will be well worth the effort, because not only will it help you be more targeted in your assessment and reporting, it's going to help you next time you go to teach this thing. So when we really understand what the curriculum is asking for, the entire teaching assessment reporting process is easier.

2.

Recognise that we can make things clearer by organising the reading standards into two sections – the bottom and top parts of Scarborough’s Reading Rope. The bottom part being able to lift words from the page and relating to fluency and the top relating more to comprehension. While these sections don’t actually sit completely separately in the act of reading, it can be a useful framework to help us in assessing, but also in instruction.

3.

Be clear about the connection between the normed reading tools that your school uses and the achievement standard and expectations of your state’s curriculum. Don’t just assume that ‘green’ on the normed assessment equals a C in the report for reading. These two things have not been written to align and we shouldn’t take that for granted.

4.

Refer to your system or state’s guidelines for assessment and reporting. It's so important that a C in your school means the same thing as a C in the school in the next suburb. Parents need to know that they can rely on the grades and we need to set our students up for success by grading in a way that's transparent, so that any future teacher, whether that's in our own school or in another one, can have confidence that we understand the needs of the students.

Moving away from benchmark assessments isn’t just about switching tools. That's the easy bit. The hard bit requires a complete shift in thinking around assessment and reporting, if we're going to avoid the same mistakes we've made in the past.

I hope that you have found these two episodes on assessment and reporting helpful. They may well have brought up more questions for you than answers, but now you know the questions to ask. Now you know the line of inquiry to go down in order to seek clarity and get that clarity to make everyone's life easier and better.

I wish you all the best for the upcoming reporting period.

See you next time, bye.

(Moderately Complex) The Spring Picnic

The Boy spread out a checkered blanket under an old oak tree, whose branches stretched up like friendly arms reaching for the clouds. The morning rain had cleared away, and now the sun made patterns on the ground as it shone through the leaves.

"Stand to attention!" called out the Tin Soldier, who was perched next to a basket filled with tasty treats. His uniform wasn't as shiny as it used to be, but his spirit was just as bright as ever.

The Velveteen Rabbit, whose fur had been loved so much it was turning shabby, hopped closer to his metal friend. "En garde," he said playfully, copying a phrase he'd heard the Boy use during games.

The wise old Skin Horse, who had been watching everything from his spot on the blanket, spoke up. "Instead of playing soldiers, perhaps we should be more careful - I can see the Boy turning around!"

The Boy, unaware that his toys were having their own adventure, was busy laying out cucumber sandwiches. While he saw only still and quiet toys, they were actually having quite the conversation.

"I'm not playing," said the Soldier, trying to keep a straight face as he wobbled on the uneven grass. "I'm conducting very serious military business." His clockwork heart ticked away as the Velveteen Rabbit tried not to laugh.

The afternoon drifted by like a lazy cloud, while the toys whispered and joked under the warm spring sunshine.

(Complex Text) The Spring Picnic

The Boy, moving with enthusiasm, spread the checkered blanket beneath the oak tree's sheltering branches. The morning's rain had left the leaves glistening, transforming ordinary sunlight into dancing diamonds overhead.

"Attention!" called the Tin Soldier, positioning himself importantly beside the basket of treats. Though his once-gleaming uniform had dulled from countless adventures, he remained dignified. "What brings you to my post?" he inquired, attempting to maintain his official tone.

The Velveteen Rabbit, whose well-worn fur was a sign of how much he was loved, hopped closer to his metallic friend. "Perhaps we could relax a bit," he suggested, trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile.

The wise old Skin Horse watched the scene with knowing eyes. "Should we not be more careful?" he suggested. "Our little discussion might not go unnoticed."

Meanwhile, the Boy arranged cucumber sandwiches in perfect rows, unaware of the amazing conversation taking place among his cherished toys.

"One must follow proper procedures," the Soldier insisted, his clockwork heart ticking steadily as he wobbled slightly on the uneven ground. The Velveteen Rabbit's quiet laughter floated through the air like windblown petals.

As the afternoon sun painted everything in golden light, this unique group of friends shared their special moment together, while time itself seemed to slow down just for them under the old oak's protective watch.

References:

ACARA Literacy General Capabilities. Understanding texts. https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/resources/national-literacy-and-numeracy-learning-progressions/national-literacy-learning-progression/reading-and-viewing/?subElementId=50915&searchTerm=multimodal+texts#dimension-content

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) 2010 to present, unless otherwise indicated. This material was downloaded (www.australiancurriculum.edu.au) (accessed 13 November, 2024) and was modified. The material is licensed under
CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0).

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