9. Assessment & Instruction: Multiple Approaches

Which of the following types of activities would be most important to include on a daily basis when planning reading instruction for first graders who are developing as beginning readers?

• activities that introduce students to basic concepts about print

• activities that emphasize listening to and producing rhyming, alliteration, and similar forms of wordplay

• activities that promote students' development of decoding and other word analysis skills

• activities that emphasize memorization of lists of grade-level-appropriate sight words

A fifth-grade class silently reads an informational text. In subsequent informal assessments, several students are able to read the text orally with fluency but they demonstrate poor overall comprehension of the text. The teacher could most appropriately address these students' needs by adjusting future instruction in which of the following ways?

• using informational texts that are written at the students' independent level

• providing the students with explicit instruction in grade-level-appropriate test-taking strategies

• introducing a text's key vocabulary and guiding the students in close reading of key passages

• emphasizing reading skill-building activities that focus primarily on narrative texts

As a first-grade teacher reads a big book to a group of students, the teacher points to the beginning consonants of selected words and accentuates the sound the initial letter makes. This activity is most likely to promote the students':

• awareness of multisyllable words.

• ability to isolate individual sounds in words.

• structural analysis skills.

• ability to blend the sounds in words.

Which of the following children is most in need of immediate intervention?

• a preschool child who has limited book-handling skills

• a kindergarten child who has limited ability to correlate alphabet letters with the sounds they make

• a first-grade student who still reads texts composed of single syllable regular words and common sight words

• a second-grade student who still decodes words letter by letter

Which of the following is the most important reason for a fourth-grade teacher to assign a variety of high-quality trade books as a component of reading instruction?

• The themes typical of children's literature tend to reinforce students' development of literal comprehension skills.

• Reading across genres helps students develop an understanding of the structures and features of different texts.

• Simplified syntax and controlled vocabulary provide necessary scaffolding for students who are struggling readers.

• Reading diverse texts helps to promote students' development of phonological and phonemic awareness skills.

Frequent oral reading to kindergarten children using appropriate and expressive intonation and voices is likely to promote the students' reading development primarily by:

• improving their aural discrimination skills.

• explicitly teaching letter-sound correspondence.

• fostering their engagement in and love of reading

• explicitly modeling phonological concepts such as word boundaries.

Which of the following strategies is likely to be most effective in promoting reluctant readers' interest in independent reading outside of school?

• Calculate numerical scores based on the number and difficulty level of the books students read at home and integrate the score into students' report card grade for reading.

• Encourage parents to give their children simple external rewards for at-home reading, such as an extra helping of a favorite treat.

• Encourage students and parents to read books together on a regular basis, either silently or aloud, and discuss their personal responses to each chapter or key event.

• Recommend that parents make their children's daily television-watching time contingent on their reading a specified number of pages first.

Electronic reading books are advantageous for beginning or struggling readers primarily because this type of computer software:

• scaffolds learning by providing a high level of interactivity.

• helps students develop familiarity with reading from a computer screen.

• provides students with models of good reading practices and habits.

• minimizes the focus on written text by using sound effects and voices to convey meaning.