Assessment Changes Instruction: Flat-lined Reading Scores

Assessment Changes Instruction. Yes it does. Like nothing other. And the changes are not always good. 

So here's a thought about flat-lined reading scores. 

My good friend Judy said it simply: "The smaller the 'piece' you try to measure, the less the measure reflects the performance you aim to measure." 

Assessing reading standards is NOT like assessing math. It's a "collective" kind of thing for measuring comprehension and not an isolated measurement of each standard. If you are trying to assess and measure each individual standard and see how it's progressing over time, you might not be measuring what you think you are. For ELAR, the level of difficulty in the passage and the reader's background knowledge are the key factors and NOT the individual questions/standards.

So here's one thing I think is happening. Students are focusing on the micro elements of the text - like inferences or main idea - and are not thinking about the macro elements of the text. They are not reading the passage to understand it as a whole. They are only looking at the pieces. Because that's what we are training them to do and to value by our weekly CFA's on main idea or inferences. We forget that we never master main idea or inference and can't cross that off our list like multiplication facts and dates of the Civil War. 

We forget that reading is about using main idea to help you monitor your comprehension. We forget that inferences are tools that help us understand the author's message and to devine the purpose. These subskills are not products to be assessed, but skills that we use to build knowledge, make meaning, apply understanding, and curate meaningful contributions to ourselves and the society around us.