Reading assessment

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Jocelyn: 0:38

Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. It's Jocelyn coming to you from Pataway Burnie, here in the absolutely gorgeous Tasmania. I am joined today by Jo Griffin, who is here for our Teacher Talk episode all about retrieval and daily review. Hi Jo, how are you going?

Jo: 0:58

Hi Jocelyn, I'm great. Excited to talk to you today.

Jocelyn: 1:01

Thank you so much for joining us, or, joining me here after school in the evening. So, everyo…

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Transcript Summary

Benchmark assessments are something that have been in schools forever in a day, and they've come to be understood as a way for us to track student growth and progress through their reading development. The challenge with a benchmark assessment is that they are usually written to align with a series of levelled texts that will be represented by a number or a letter and, unfortunately, they don't actually measure the thing that we think they do…

One of the ‘hot topics’ right now is how to grade reading when we are moving towards a more evidence informed method of assessment.   In a previous post, I wrote about how you might conduct that assessment (here) but the next natural question is, “How does this align with the Australian Curriculum from which we have to grade?”

I warn you, this post is a monster, but I wanted you to have some solid, simple information from which you could make a judgement about reading grades.

The first thing t…

“What’s his level?” It’s a question repeated over and over again in Australian Schools.  It seems that everywhere you look kids are being tested using a popular benchmarking kit that ends up providing an instructional and independent level for reading.  Let’s be honest. The idea of a ‘level’ is attractive. It gives us an easily measurable way to track progress in a child’s reading.  The problem with this system is that it doesn’t effectively measure a child’s reading progress at all.   This sy…