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Children's Literacy Initiative uses assessment to answer
three primary questions.
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Have
students learned the skills, knowledge, and reading and writing
habits that they need in the early grades? |
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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.
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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.
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Student Portfolios are an organized process teachers
and students use to collect and analyze evidence of growth
and progress in a specific subject area.
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Are
teachers reaching their goals? |
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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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How
successful is CLI's professional development? |
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Assessment
data also demonstrates the effectiveness of CLI's training.
Drs. Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen, professors at
SUNY Albany and two of the nation's foremost reading experts,
performed an independent study of our program during the 1996-1997
school year. Their study, called the Philadelphia Kindergarten
Literacy Intervention (P-KLIP), evaluated the performance of
students in classrooms that received CLI training compared to
students in classrooms that did not receive training. The study
compared assessment data from six Philadelphia schools. Two
schools received CLI books and training, two schools received
book collections and no training, and the final two schools
(the control group) received neither books nor training.
Seven assessments of vocabulary and language development were
given to all 456 kindergarten students at the beginning and
end of the study. In addition to the assessments, data was also
collected from teacher lists of books read aloud, transcriptions
of those readings, and classroom observation. The study found
that the students on those schools that received books and training
scored far higher on literacy assessments than either the control
group or those students who received books but no training.
Three independent studies of CLI's work in Baltimore Pre-Kindergarten
classrooms conducted by Dr. Ludo C.P. Scheffer in 1998, 1999,
and 2000 showed that CLI's professional development program,
combined with children's books and materials, helps raise achievement
on assessments of reading readiness such as the PPVT, Letter
Identification, and Concepts About Print.
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learn more about these studies, click this button |
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