Evidence of Learning

LANGUAGE ARTS CURRICULUM Evidence of Learning

Back to Table of Contents

Benchmark Assessment – an assessment given to students that drive instruction and provides a snapshot to the district on how it is doing. Common Formative Assessment (CFA) – an assessment given to students that drives instruction. Degrees of Reading Power ® (DRP) Test – test assesses a reader’s skill in using context clues and vocabulary knowledge; the cloze format is used where a portion of text has some words removed, perhaps every fourth of fifth word. Readers typically select from three or four word choices to replace the omitted word. Developmental Reading Assessment ® (DRA) – an individual reading assessment designed to assess students’ reading performance in Grades K-8. Students are assessed on their reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension skills. Informal Reading Assessment (IRA) – an assessment that does not contain normed data such as percentile ranks, but instead are content and performance driven. Examples of this type of assessment include: Rigby Benchmark Reading Assessment, running records, and rubric scoring measures. Letter/Sound Identification Test – assessment requiring students to say the names and corresponding sounds of the alphabet letters. Running Records – assessments teachers use to code, score, and analyze a child’s oral reading behaviors. They provide evidence of what a student knows about letter, sound, and word recognition to help them understand the text. In addition, running records helps teachers assess a student’s reading level and development of independent reading strategies as the student reads increasingly difficult texts. While a student reads a text, the teacher marks errors on the teacher copy of the text. These can be used during reading instruction and are also part of the DRA and Rigby Benchmark assessments. Sentence Dictation Task – this assessment is used to determine how well children are able to hear and write the sounds they hear in our language. Any sentence that has the variety of phonemes a teacher wishes to assess may be used. This is not a spelling test, instead children write the letters corresponding to the ‘sounds’ they hear. For example, full credit would be given to a student writing gam instead of game since the ‘e’ is not heard. Sight Word List – also called high-frequency word list, these are the words that appear most often in printed materials. For example, the words I, and, and the account for ten percent of all words in printed English.

410