“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right.... Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential.” Kofi Annan Ghanaian diplomat, seventh secretary-general of the United Nations, 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

Angela Hartz

Topic:

Literacy Assessment: formal and informal measure of assessment

Chapter 4

Chapter four covers assessing literacy, formal and informal. This topic is in a way controversial, however assessment in some way is almost mandatory. It is up to you as a teacher to research and find a method of assessment suitable to you and your classroom. There are many methods out there, and information on the topic is bountiful! I have provided the following links in hopes that you may find useful information. I believe the following sites to be some of the best that I viewed.

American Library Association Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report

The following topics are listed on the ACRL site:

· The importance of information literacy to individuals, business, and citizenship

· Opportunities to develop information Literacy

· An Information Age School

· A conclusion which includes bold statements such as:

“…the aims should always be the same: to communicate the power of knowledge; to develop in each citizen a sense of his or her responsibility to acquire knowledge and deepen insight through better use of information and related technologies; to instill a love of learning, a thrill in searching, and a joy in discovering; and to teach young and old alike how to know when they have an information need and how to gather, synthesize, analyze, interpret, and evaluate the information around them.”

The ACRL gives background information on literacy, something I feel is important in studying all aspects of literacy, especially assessment. Without understanding the different parts of literacy it is near impossible to learn to assess it. This page gives advice on how to achieve, statistics on how far the decline in literacy has gone, what needs to be done to improve our schools today, and most important it tells how important it is to be able to obtain information in today’s ever-changing world. I suggest this site to anyone who needs motivation to teach literacy in his or her content area; without it, the world seems scarier. URL:

http://www.ala.org/acrl/nili/ilit1st.html

Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report

Principles of Effective Literacy Assessment

This link of the NCREL website gives information on the following topics:

1. Assessment should be an ongoing process.

2. Effective assessment is an integral part of instruction.

3. Effective assessment is an integral part of instruction.

4. Assessment should be a collaborative, reflective process.

5. Effective assessment is multidimensional.

6. Assessment should be developmentally and culturally appropriate.

7. Effective assessment identifies students' strengths

8. Assessment must be based on what we know about how students learn to read and write

All eight of these topics are listed, and it gives a paragraph following each with an explanation that really clarifies each point. Although this is a short link from the site covering only assessment, I recommend visiting the homepage. The entire web-site is dedicated to education and is very interesting to search. This link really gives you a clear basic understanding of assessment. It’s not exactly the same as that of Chapter 4, but it hits on some of the same main ideas.URL:

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/reading/li7lk5.htm

This link, Literacy Assessment Techniques , takes you to the same website, because as I said it has a lot of information, but gives you a chart that outlines some techniques helpful in assessing literacy. It lists techniques, purpose, and comments in a very organized, easy to read chart. URL: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/reading/li7lk29.htm

This URL list tests to assess and evaluate a literacy program, for those who may be curious to know. It is by no means an exiting page, but it has the information. (also from the NCREL site).

http://www.ncrel.org/literacy/eval/assessment%20summaries.doc

INFORMAL ASSESSMENT IN EDUCATIONAL EVALUATION:

Out of all the web-sites I viewed this one would probably be the most extensive, or most beneficial one. It list topics such as:

*CONCERNS WITH STANDARDIZED TESTING

*DEFINING INFORMAL ASSESSMENT

*INFORMAL ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES

-Unstructured Assessment Techniques

-Structured Assessment Techniques

*Table 1 - Types of Unstructured Assessment Techniques

Writing Samples

Homework

Logs or journals

Games

Debates

Brainstorming

Story retelling

Anecdotal

Naturalistic

*Table 2 - Types of Structured Informal Assessments

Checklists

Cloze Tests

Criterion-referenced Tests

Rating Scales

Questionnaires

Miscue Analysis

Structured Interviews

*GUIDELINES FOR INFORMAL ASSESSMENT

Validity and Reliability

Scoring Procedures

*Table 3 - Scoring Assessments for Unstructured Activities

Holistic

Analytic

Primary Trait

General Impression Markings

Error Patterns

Assigning Grades

*COMBINING ASSESSMENTS FOR EVALUATION

Student Portfolios

Guidelines for Using Portfolios in Bilingual Education Evaluations

*EVALUATION OF ESEA TITLE VII- FUNDED PROGRAMS

REPORTING ASSESSMENT DATA

URL: http://www.ncbe.gwu.edu/ncbepubs/pigs/pig3.htm

As you can see the information on this site is very extensive.

How Well Do Tests Measure Real Reading?

The Eric site (use the URL is at the end) contains an article about how well tests measures reading that I found very interesting. It tells some statistics that pertain to reading assessment from studies that were conducted, plus other information pertaining to reading assessment. It informs us that “Virtually all methods of assessing reading are indirect, even those that claim to directly assess reading processes. We cannot actually see the processes involved; we can only infer how a reader has comprehended. Therefore, all scores or data produced by tests of reading are indirect measures of the reading process.” This page isn’t very long, but I feel like it says a whole lot about how hard it is to assess reading abilities. URL:

http://www.indiana.edu/~eric_rec/www/digbib/digprint.cgi?filename=d041.txt

Understanding Authentic Classroom-Based Literacy Assess...

This site has great links on assessment, which are listed below.

· Introduction

· The changing picture of assessment

· What is Authentic Assessment?

· Why is it important to align instruction and assessment?

· Why does assessment need to be ongoing?

· What are the different forms of authentic assessment?

· Why is student self-assessment important?

· Authentic classroom assessment in action.

· How can teachers become more effective and efficient at classroom-based assessment?

· Final Thoughts

This site gives a lot of the same advice and information as our text, but it still very well worth taking the time to look at. Assessing literacy is very complicated, but with resources such as these we can’t say we didn’t know any other way.

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