Assessment Plan

The content area I want to focus on is reading. Reading is such an important skill for all children. It also carries over into all aspects of the child’s life so it is important to know how the child is functioning in their reading abilities.

The first assessment I would give the student is a running record. A running record is a great way to see what skills the student has and at what level skills are. One way to do this assessment is to use the Basic Reading Inventory assessment tool. Another way is to have two copies of a passage the student is suppose to read and mark on the teacher copy when the child makes an error in their reading. This will allow the teacher to see what types of errors that the child makes while reading. Also while reading the passage the teacher can keep track of how many words per minute the student is reading to determine the students reading rate.

The next assessment I would do would be to ask the student comprehension questions. Being able to comprehend and understand what you read is very important for everyone. However, often children who are deaf or hard of hearing have a hard time with comprehension. Therefore it is important that we as teachers target this skill and continue to build on this skill. Questions that I would ask the students would be who is this story about, what was the problem, how did he/she try to fix the problem, were they successful, what else did they try to fix the problem, etc. Based on the students responses additional questions may need to be asked to make sure the students understood what they read.

There are many different formal assessments that can be used for assessing reading skills. The assessment that I would use would be Accelerated Reader. My school during student teaching used this program. For this program all books are assigned a reading level. The students take a test to determine what their reading level should be. Then the students read a book on that level and take a test on the book. The test consists of 5 to 10 questions about the book. Each book then has a number of points that it is worth. Depending on how many comprehension questions the students get correct determines how many points they earn for reading that book. The students also have a specific reading points goal that they have to ear during each quarter. In my classroom my teacher then gave those students that met their AR goal a little party. This assessment program is great because it tells the teacher how the students are doing reading and comprehending on their own. If they are struggling then the teacher knows to work more one on one with that student to see where they are struggling. The kids from my student teaching placement also responded well to this program because they were motivated to read and they wanted to do well on their tests to earn their points.