Children's Literacy Initiative uses assessment to answer three primary questions.

CLI helps teachers collect and analyze important information about students' literacy and language development. Teachers who attend training Institutes assess children at the beginning of their training and again at the end of the school year, for a variety of purposes:

• revealing what students have mastered and which concepts need further attention,
• measuring gains in reading, writing, language development, and other skills,
• providing individualized information that guides future instruction,
• helping teachers, principals, and administrators monitor and evaluate the literacy progress of different students, classrooms, and schools, and
• comparing students to national standards, such as Reading & Writing Grade by Grade: Primary Literacy Standards for Kindergarten Through Third Grade (1999), developed by the National Center on Education and the Economy and the University of Pittsburgh.

CLI can provide materials, training, and assistance for teachers to administer a portion of the following assessments for different grade levels:

• Marie Clay's Observation Survey, including the following tasks:
  
  
  • Alphabet Letter Identification is a test that measures children's letter knowledge, as well as their knowledge of the sounds of letters. There are 28 lower case letters (two forms of "a" and "g") and 26 upper case letters, for a total possible score of 54.
    
    
  • Concepts About Print assesses children's knowledge of print conventions such as reading from left to right and top to bottom, and the difference between words and letters. CLI uses an adapted version that includes 16 out of the 24 items identified by Marie Clay.
    
    
  • Writing Vocabulary is an assessment that asks children to write down all the words they know in a short period of time, revealing their knowledge of letters, sounds, and print conventions. View data samples
    
    
  • Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words, or phonemic awareness, is an essential element of learning to read and write. For this test, a student writes two short sentences that the test administrator dictates. The test score is based on the number of letters or phonemes the child records correctly. View data samples
    
    
  • Word Tests are lists of high frequency words, or sight words, which children read aloud.
    
    
• Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) is a nationally normed vocabulary test with high reliability that measures vocabulary knowledge and comprehension, considered by experts to be one of the most important indicators of reading readiness. By the end of kindergarten, a child should have a working vocabulary of at least 8,000 words.
  
  
• Running Records were developed by Marie Clay and are packaged in several formats, such as Celebration Press/Pearson Learning's "Developmental Reading Assessment." By observing a student reading aloud and documenting his or her reading behaviors, teachers can summarize the child's understanding of written language, reactions to new language, and strategies for self-correction. This ongoing assessment charts a child's progress in reading and facilitates "miscue analysis" to guide instruction.
  
  
• Story Retelling is another procedure for evaluating literacy growth. By having a child read a story aloud and then retell it, a teacher may observe how well s/he decodes and comprehends printed language.
  
  
• Student Portfolios are an organized process teachers and students use to collect and analyze evidence of growth and progress in a specific subject area.
  

CLI has developed a system for documenting how teachers use the effective practices they learn through working with CLI. We have developed rubrics for each of our training areas:

• implementing Message Time Plus®,
• engaging students in effective read-alouds,
• utilizing academic centers and small group instruction,
• working with children's writing, and
• creating a classroom literacy environment.
  

Trainers demonstrate and explain these rubrics when coaching begins. Throughout the school year, CLI trainers review teachers' progress toward these goals during coaching hours.

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