Key Vocabulary:
Running Records: Formal records documenting whether a specific book is in a student’s Independent Reading Level, Instructional Reading Level, or Frustrational Reading Level.
Minilessons: A sort of “subplot” of the lesson plan. The teaching of processes, strategies, concepts, etc. that are all included within the main lesson.
Book Talk: The process of a student describing a book that they have read to their class. This includes stating what the book is and who wrote it, along with engaging the classmates and piquing interest.
4 Steps of Assessment: Planning for assessment, monitoring students’ progress, evaluating students’ learning, and reflecting on students’ learning.
Anecdotal Notes: Notes that teachers take recording observations they have made of their students.
Rubrics: Scoring guides for assignments.
Portfolios: A student’s collection of their work used to evaluate their progress.
Independent Reading Level: The student is able to read a book easily on their own with an accuracy of 95-100%.
Instructional Reading Level: The student is able to read a book with minimal support with an accuracy of 90-94%.
Frustrational Reading Level: The student is unable to read a book. They have less than 90% accuracy.
Guided Reading: Reading in small groups of students at similar reading levels.
Leveled Books: Books labeled according to their reading levels. They can be labeled based on grade level, the Fountas and Pinnell alphabetic levels, or with the Lexile Framework.
Lexile Framework: The use of word familiarity and sentence complexity to rank a student’s reading level and the reading level of any given book on a scale of 100-1300.
Informal Reading Inventories: A test that measures a student’s reading level.
Miscue Analysis: The process of analyzing a student’s reading mistakes in order to determine their reading strategies and strengths.
SOLOM: Student Oral Language Observation Matrix. A rating scale of an English learner’s understanding of the English language.
Five Components of Oral Language: Listening, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar.
KWL Charts: A chart created by students showing what they know, what they want to know, and what they learned about a subject during any given lesson.
Test-Taking Strategies: Read and understand the entire question first, look for key words in the question, read all choices before answering a multiple choice question, answer easier questions first, make smart guesses, don’t change your answer unless sure that your original answer is wrong, pace yourself, and carefully check your work.
High-Stakes Testing: Test meant to measure a student’s knowledge of a subject objectively. Used to judge students’, teachers’, administrators’, and schools’ performances.
Portfolio Assessment: The use of a student’s Portfolio to assess their progress.
Classroom Application:
Monitoring students’ progress is one of the most important parts of being a teacher. Regardless of how high or low their reading levels are, students should constantly be improving. If they are not, the teacher needs to intervene, if they have not already. Several of the vocabulary terms above, such as Portfolio Assessments, SOLOM, and Running Records describe very useful assessment tools that language arts teachers can use with their students.
Morgan Wyatt 