Assessment Tools and Strategies

• Just Right Assessments as described by Team Guinn are the assessments used to pinpoint and determine the academic learning needs of students. Using "Just Right Assessments" saves valuable instructional time and helps plan the appropriate instruction to help students move along the literacy learning continuum. 

• 3-minute Reading Assessments contain leveled reading passages paired with assessment pages allows teachers to quickly screen students for reading difficulties such as low word recognition, poor fluency rate and inadequate comprehension. 

• Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) (K-3 and 4-8 kits) allow teachers to determine each student’s independent and instructional level with an evaluation of three components of reading: reading engagement, oral reading fluency, and comprehension. DRA Word Analysis, included in the K-3 kit, is a diagnostic assessment that provides teachers with a systematic means to observe how struggling and emerging readers attend to, and work with various components of spoken and written words.

• Assessing Reading Multiple Measures, 2^nd Edition will help teachers identify reading difficulties with different assessments all contained in one book. The book contains assessments that measure fluency and comprehension, screen vocabulary, survey knowledge of high frequency words, etc. This is a valuable resource for teachers working to improve the reading achievement of both beginning and struggling readers.

• Running Records (Reading A to Z) provide an assessment of text reading, and are designed to be taken as a student reads orally from any text.  Running records capture what the readers said and did while reading books or texts. Teachers can review the running record to determine what happened immediately, which leads to a teaching decision on the spot, or at a later time as teachers plan for next lessons that address the readers’ difficulties.

• Basic Phonics Skills Test-II (BPST-II), created by John Shefelbine, is an informal test of high utility, spelling-sound relationships for reading single-syllable words and syllabic and morphemic strategies for reading polysyllabic words. This assessment is best used with other kinds of assessments included leveled passages, graded word lists, and measures of phonemic awareness (especially blending).