8. Reading Assessment & Instruction

A third-grade teacher has been conducting a series of ongoing assessments of a student's oral reading. Shown below is a sentence from a text, followed by a transcription of a typical example of the student's oral reading performance.

Text: Her boots crunched through the snow.

Student: Her boats crucked throw the snow.

After reading the sentence, the student paused and then reread it without the teacher's prompting and self-corrected the errors. Based on this information, the teacher could best meet this student's needs by adjusting instruction in order to:

• enhance the student's oral vocabulary development.

• develop the student's ability to self-monitor comprehension.

• improve the student's decoding skills.

• promote the student's ability to track print.

Which of the following types of assessments would best provide information about the comparative reading proficiency of students in an elementary school?

• a test of vocabulary development

• a norm-referenced survey test

• a reading miscue inventory

• a diagnostic portfolio

Considerations of validity in test construction relate most closely to:

• how a particular examinee's test performance relates to a preestablished standard.

• whether the test questions effectively measure their specified content.

• how a particular examinee's test performance compares to the performance of other examinees.

• whether the test results are likely to be repeatable with a similar examinee test group.

If a standardized test is said to lack reliability, the test:

• is not measuring what it is supposed to measure.

• has not proven to be useful as an instructional intervention.

• gives fluctuating scores in different administrations.

• has poor predictive value relative to students' classroom performance.

Which of the following informal assessment results provides the clearest indication that a kindergarten child has attained a beginning level of phonemic awareness?

• The student can clap the "beats" or syllables of familiar multisyllable words.

• The student can delete the second "word" or syllable in compound words.

• The student can identify the beginning sound of single-syllable words.

• The student can substitute phonemes in the medial position of single

One of the most important purposes of a standardized Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) is:

• to establish how prior knowledge and text organization influence a student's reading comprehension.

• to determine how a student uses semantic, syntactic, and other text clues to deduce a word's meaning.

• to analyze how a student's silent reading comprehension is influenced by oral reading fluency.

• to establish a students's independent, instructional and frustration reading levels.

An advantage of using assessment tools such as portfolios and scoring rubrics is that they:

• provide more objective results than do multiple-choice tests.

• promote student participation in self-assessment activities.

• ensure student participation in self-assessment activities.

• offer more reliable assessment data.

Which of the following best describes the primary advantage of having a student read a passage silently and then provide a "retelling" as a means of assessing the student's comprehension, rather than having the student answer questions?

• A retelling is open-ended and requires the student to construct a description of the passage more independently of the examiner.

• The results of a retelling are more objective and easier to quantify than the results of direct questioning.

• The procedure involved in retelling tends to be more familiar to a wider range of students, including English Language Learners.

• A retelling can provide information about the student's inferential comprehension skills, which questioning cannot provide.

Which of the following criteria would be most important to consider when selecting "leveled texts" for use in assessments and guided reading with beginning-level readers?

• The texts should use repeated words and natural oral language structures.

• The texts should require readers to use problem-solving to connect text to illustrations.

• The texts should emphasize use of literary language and dialogues.

• The text should feature a range of punctuation and context-specific vocabulary.

In order to select a trade book that emphasizes predictability, a teacher should ensure that:

• the text includes some pictures or illustrations.

• the concepts in the text are at an appropriate level of difficulty for the target student(s).

• a phrase, rhyme or sentence is repeated throughout the text.

• the length of the text is not likely to exceed the attention span of the target student(s).