Assessments

It has been a long time since I have posted on the progress of our research project. The delay is partly due to lack of progress. As all teachers, we have found ourselves bogged down by the demands of the job. Sickness and snow days have impacted our ability to collaborate and plan. Curricular demands have delayed the administration of pre and post assessments. And the teaching of metacognition and thinking strategies has felt a bit clunky. Our reading curriculum, developed by National Heritage Academies in Grand Rapids, MI, correlates well with common core standards. But the length of the lessons, the frequency of required assessments, and the sheer volume of content has made strategy instruction challenging. While thinking strategies are the big umbrellas underneath which the standards lie, the reality of meshing that instruction with standards and skills based instruction has proven to be challenging.

Despite all of these obstacles, we are happy to report growth. At the beginning of our strategy instruction we gave a pre assessment on both thinking aloud and monitoring for meaning. The students showed growth in both areas. On the thinking aloud assessment, the students grew from an average score of 2.0 (out of a 5 point scale) to a 2.5. On the monitoring for meaning assessment the students grew from an average score of 2.3 to a score of 2.5.

We observed that students improved in their ability to think about what they are reading and connect it to their own lives. We also observed that students seemed more aware of difficulties they experienced when reading text. However, we noticed that students continued to have difficulty naming specific things they could do to problem solve when experiencing difficulty and we noticed that while their thinking improved, it often was lacking in depth.

Moving forward we are going to be even more explicit in our instruction of strategies than we have been in the past. The strategy we are currently teaching is Determining Importance. We are working on not only modeling the strategy through thinking aloud, but also helping the students apply it to their independent reading in very concrete ways. We are eager to see our students’ thinking continue to deepen.