Assessment Practices & Tools at Read/Write/Now

A Reflection on the Ideal vs. the Real

Janet Kelly
Read/Write/Now
Springfield

"Reflection” may be too serene and contemplative a word for what I’m going to do in this piece and definitely for the place I’m doing it from. There is traffic whizzing by outside my sunporch as I write, cats walking over my paper, and the constant awareness of my baby son’s sleeping presence in the next room. Is he really sleeping? Did that last truck’s passing wake him?

I’m struck by how like my program’s one room environment this distraction-packed home space is, at least when there are no classes in action. In the program space the distractions are endless phone calls, visitors, various staff people coming and going, learners coming to visit or check out books, daily details, and unforeseen crises that are all part of life in a learning center.

Yet, despite the distractions, reflection and review of assessment practices and tools still happen. They have become a part of what we see as necessary to make our curriculum as responsive as possible to learners’ goals and needs. I would like to be able to say they had a more central, deliberate place in the work of our program, but because of our small budget and resulting shortage of staff hours, much of the work of assessment is fit into too little time around the edges of classes and preparation of materials. In principle it is central, in practice it doesn’t get enough time yet.

We are working on it. We have a one-year writing and publishing grant that allows teachers some more hours. At least this year we have the possibility of making the real more like the ideal in terms of better integrating assessment into curriculum and program development.

Another goal for this year is to make our assessment process and tools more responsive to the needs of learners. We are beginning to hear what learners have to tell us about the kinds of assessment tools we use and the way we use them. I think we have relied more on what we as teachers thought was important to learners, what we were interested in knowing about their progress, what we thought we could document, and what we thought funders would want to know. These beliefs still form the basis of our choices in assessment practices, but I hope we will find ways to invite learners to share more effectively in decisions not only about program and curriculum evaluation, which they currently do, but also in the selection of and critique of materials for their own assessment portfolios.

Rethinking Tools and Practices
After the first two volumes of Adventures in Assessment came out, I began to rethink some of the choices of tools and practices I’d included with the articles about Read/Write/Now. That’s partly because of the nature of this kind of assessment as well as the nature of writing and publishing. Obviously, nothing that’s based on human beings’ changing needs and goals is ever finished or perfect. Our needs and goals are continually changing and new information or a new perspective on an old practice requires making revisions in what was “perfect” for last year, or yesterday. Many forms designed to fit a perceived need in assessment have seemed perfect until they were put to practical use. Then the revisions needed become obvious. Also, sharing or publishing anything I’ve put in writing, whether it’s a grant proposal or a poem, is one sure-fire way of seeing it with new eyes, sometimes through the responses of readers and sometimes through being able to stand back far enough to see it in a new way. This is one of the great things about this journal — learning from what other people are doing by reading articles and talking to people and learning more about what we are doing by writing about it.

It’s also been interesting to hear about ways other programs have adapted things we use; this has helped us see our own practices in a new light, too. The journal has helped expand our collaborative style of working together to include other teachers in other programs. Our own program has expanded to include a family literacy program funded by Even Start, which is a collaboration with the Springfield School Department. The Even Start staff have brought new ideas and a family literacy perspective to portfolio assessment, which has been a positive addition to our overall assessment process.

Changes in the Read/Write/Now Portfolio
What’s in a portfolio at Read/Write/Now these days and how it differs from what was in a portfolio two years ago is something I’d like think about on paper. Looking at the summary that was included in the November ’91 issue of Adventures. I see things we’ve kept doing and things we’ve let go due to lack or relevance or time.

In the category of “Goal Setting”, we continue to use an extensive interview in our initial screening with a placement “test” that includes a teacher-made reading comprehension sample, the Slosson Oral Reading Test to evaluate word recognition and decoding skills, and a writing sample. The Even Start adult education staff used the Fry readability scale to level various passages of writing by adult learners and created questions to assess comprehension for more definitive placement of learners.

The Read/Write/Now Screening & Placement Interview as published in Vol. 1 of Adventures is an example of a tool that seemed to address a perceived need, but didn’t work in the real situation at all. On the final page I had put in a statement/question about drugs and alcohol use that I thought would clarify a previously unstated and murky policy. It was to be read and signed by both interviewers and interviewees. The first time I tried to use it I found that I couldn’t; the first face-to-face meeting with a prospective learner didn’t feel right for dealing with this issue. Things sometimes look so appealing on paper but make no sense in practice. So that part of the form was eliminated.

Our Goals Checklist has stayed about the same for a couple of years, with only minor revisions. The Even Start team used it as a basis for designing a family literacy goals checklist, and added a feature of choosing short and long term goals. Learning Contracts are still vital pieces of our program and assessment process. We have seen a lot of growth in both learners’ and teachers’ ability to use this tool to name and reach goals. We’ve all gotten better at being more realistic and organized about arriving at workable goals and breaking them into understandable steps. New staff are helped in this by seasoned learners and staff and new learners are helped in the same way. Knowing our limits without limiting ourselves too much is one of the great balancing acts of adult life, it seems. We’re always working on that one.

One change we’ve made in relation to Learning Contracts is setting aside time for individual learning contract conferences at the beginning of each class cycle instead of trying to do lengthy conferences during regular class time. This has helped us to really hear each person, find out what they need and want to do, and also helps determine how committed a learner is who we have questions about from past history. Sometimes a contract review session includes an update and slight revision of a learner’s goals rather than a whole new set of goals.

Often, the review shows a progression from one set of goals to a logical next set. James M., who accomp-lished his long-term goal of attaining a Commercial Driver’s License after his 20 year factory job ended when the factory closed, got a job driving a bus this summer. His goals for this fall include improving his map reading skills.

Some of the tools for reading and writing assessment are still used as described in Vols. 1 & 2 of Adventures while others have faded away from disuse, been purposefully retired, or are used differently now. We still use learners’ book lists and reading conference records as tools for ongoing assessment. In addition, Marilyn Antonucci, a Read/Write/Now teacher who is now a part of the Even Start team, developed another form, the Reading Conference Checklist, which provides a framework for seasoned staff to do a more comprehensive reading conference or helps new staff and substitutes understand what’s involved in an individual reading conference. This form is used as needed throughout cycles.

The Reading Progress Checklist is still used to record development of reading strategies of all but beginning level readers. The comments section has become a place to summarize reading progress as observed by teachers. A Beginning Readers Progress Checklist was developed by Marilyn Antonucci to assess the development of reading behaviors and strategies by learners in the “0 - 1.9” reading level category. These learners’ portfolios also include samples of their language experience stories and cloze activities. Two tools that have faded away are “Looking At Your Own Reading Behavior” and the modified Burke Reading Interview. They may be used in reading groups as a stimulus for discussion about the reading process, especially in a group of learners new to the program.

Reading Miscue Analysis continues to be an important component of our reading assessment, but routine detailed miscue analysis with all learners for whom it is appropriate is still a goal rather than a reality. The biggest barrier to frequent, comprehensive miscue analysis has been too few staff to schedule the uninterrupted time needed with learners to do the miscue inventory and analysis afterwards. We also need more staff development time to practice doing miscues so that more than one or two teachers are comfortable doing it.

Reading Response Journals have also been added to some learners’ portfolios. Readers who have gotten involved in writing responses to their independent reading have chosen to use another one- page form to periodically evaluate their own written response. This encourages the development of critical reflection of reading and validates the active aspect of the reading process — what the reader brings to the text and what meaning he/she makes of it.

Writing assessment still consists of a first writing sample, dialogue journal samples, other dated writing samples and published writings. We have aimed for, but not completely routinized, learners and teachers deciding together about what goes into portfolios. We need to add a simple statement about who picked which piece and why. We know this at the time and think we’re going to remember, but sometimes it gets lost along the way. The Writing Progress Checklist has been substantially revised to reflect the kind of analysis of learners’ writing we really do and have time for. The form is used twice in a cycle and compared. The Writing Conference Record kept in each learner’s writing folder has been revised slightly to encourage recording any writing activity, rather than just “skills worked on”. Several teachers have found it useful to keep more involved logs of where learners are in their writing, but these notes don’t find their way into the portfolios.

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Learning Logs a Favorite, But Discarded for Now
A poet/teacher once said his favorite line in a poem is the one that needed to be thrown out to make the poem work. Learning logs were like that favorite line for me. I was very attached to the idea, partly because I did something like them in an alternative education class in high school and loved it. However, nobody else liked them, learners or staff, so they were thrown out. I keep hoping to devise some variation on the logs that will mean more to people. The format used the same four statements to elicit learners’ comments on their own learning in and out of the program on a weekly basis. Many learners gave rote answers, often using the previous week’s log as a pattern. Most people felt it was something they were doing for teachers, not for themselves. Although some people did start to use the logs to reflect on their learning and let us know about things they liked and didn’t like, most people never seemed to feel ownership of the logs. We’ve considered using one different question each week, but we haven’t tried it yet. Meantime there is always a lot of talk about learning, about what works and doesn’t, but learners are not necessarily putting it into writing. This kind of talk often finds its way into dialogue journals.

We continue to use a revised form of the Teacher’s Log for Observations & Reflections and find it very helpful. One challenge is finding a way to make significant entries in the logs part of learners’ portfolios. The logs are primarily used for teachers to reflect on how particular learners are doing, document evidence of literacy learning and growth in self-esteem, and make note of interests and needs to follow up on. Significant anecdotes and observations could be recorded on a joint teacher/learner form each learning contract period or month. This would give definite shape to teachers sharing their observations with learners and act as another forum for learners to tell teachers what they have observed about their own learning. ( I hear the Read/Write/Now staff saying: “Somebody stop her before she creates another form!”)

Learners’ self-evaluation forms, which include some program evaluation, are revised as needed by staff every cycle. It would probably be very useful to ask learners to help us devise a better way to elicit critical responses to questions about program design and effectiveness. What seems to work best is time and trust. The longer learners are part of the learning center community, the better they get at telling us what works for them, what doesn’t, what they like and don’t like and why.

Some Time to Think, Please
If I won the lottery and could start an endowment fund for Read/Write/Now so that shortages did not exist, one thing I’d do (after making all staff full time with benefits, adding more classes, and having windows put in our room) is hire a clerical person to help us maintain the organization. This mythical person could also answer the phone and do other essential work that would allow teachers and myself to spend more time on making the real assessment process and tools a little more like the ideal ones we keep striving for.

One thing I have recognized in these few years of being involved in alternative assessment is that we can’t go back. Standardized tests alone would never capture the range and richness of literacy learning, personal and social growth, awareness and involvement in community life and issues, and that overused but apt work, ‘empowerment’ that happens in the lives of adult learners. Tests alone could not show these things in ways authentic enough to satisfy either learners’ or teachers’ need to know. So, lottery or no lottery, we are committed to this process of continual rethinking, reflecting, streamlining, expanding, and revising assessment tools and the ways we use them.

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This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 5 (October 1993), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1993.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.