Assesment.Record+Keeping.Reporting

In my kindergarten placement most of the assessment has been through observation and having the students participate in class discussions and activities. Both the classroom teacher and the paraprofessional assess the students periodically on an individual basis by calling them up and having them do such things as filling in missing numbers in a sequence or finding a pattern, etc. They record these results each time and compare their scores to how they did on their previous assessment.

In my resource room placement, the assessment is done much differently. The students that come in throughout the day are in third and fifth grade and they do daily literacy activities, such as correcting sentences, that they go over most days as a class once they have a chance to finish, but once a week the teacher takes it up without giving the answers and she grades it and records their score in her grade book. The exercises usually have the potential to have many right or wrong so the scores throughout the class have the tendency to differ dramatically based on their achievement levels. In the third grade resource class, the resource teacher has me to work with each student with their own set of sight word flash cards, and I then record on a bar graph the amount of sight words out of 10 that they get correct. The ones that are identified correctly are taken out of the sight word pile and the same amount of new sight words are added for the student to practice at home. This assessment is made once a week, but I try to run through the words to practice with them each day, since their is no more than 7 students in the class and many of them may not be getting the help they need at home.

My teacher has set up a new filing system that makes keeping track of assessments and files easier. She has a folder for each student, that is labeled in a bin. For every graded work, and some ungraded, she has the students drop their work into their folder. The students have one of their DLR's graded each week, and the students are informed about which day this will be, so that they put forth their best work, because they've been making very low grades. Each friday, the students have a spelling test. The format is different from any spelling test that I've seen before. There is a paragraph/story that is read to the students that contain the spelling words first, and then she goes back and says the first spelling word, and agian reads it in context. The class has a copy of the text in front of them, with blanks left for the spelling words, so that they know whether or not a word should be capatilized. This allows them to practice their grammar skills outside of spelling as well.