Adolescent Literature

Assessment

The purpose of assessment is for middle school teachers and their students to answer two core questions: "How am I doing?" and "How can I do better?" Additional questions that help teachers dig deeper into understanding their students focus on the following:

What are my students' strengths and needs as readers and writers?
How are students progressing in specific areas, such as comprehension in relation to standards?
What teaching approaches and strategies are effective with groups of students as well as individual students?
What teaching strategies need to be revised to meet these needs?
In what ways are the goals of a reading program being met?

Students can reap benefits from assessments in different ways.
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For example, assessments can help students focus their attention on the teacher's expectations for learning, what content and skills are important, and the criteria against which their performance will be judged. The scores or results of an assessment process give students added information about their own strengths and areas that need improvement. Over time, by engaging in frequent assessments, students can learn the importance of self-evaluation as a way to set goals, monitor their work, and evaluate their own progress.

Before designing or conducting assessment, teachers need to consider the following:

The overall development needs of early adolescents
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An understanding based on research about how students learn to read and write
www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/stw_esys/str_read.htm
Information about what can be assessed
Relevant information about a student's background, language use, and culture
A clear identification of curriculum goals related to standards about adolescent literacy

The design of good assessments is based on the following principles:

The assessment process should be ongoing.
Assessment activities should be authentic, reflecting 'real' reading and writing.
Given that the information yielded is critical to both teachers and students, assessments should be collaborative endeavors.
Opportunities for reflection need to be built into the process, especially in terms of analyzing results.
Assessment is stronger when it involves multidimensional materials and activities.

Research findings indicate that four of the most effective assessment strategies involve the following:

Conferencing with students uses different formats to meet with students who orally describe their reading experiences.
Checklists and observation forms are systematic forms for teachers and student to use while observing their reading.
Performance assessments' rubrics are scoring tools that list the criteria for a piece of work or 'what counts.' They also articulate gradations of quality for each criterion, from excellent to poor. Such rubrics help students understand intermediate goals to which they can scaffold their own work and progress as part of a self-help evaluative routine.
Reading portfolios are collections of students' work, stored in folders, that showcase a reader's growth, experiences, achievement, and self-reflection over a period of time.

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