Ask the Experts

Student Assessment - General Assessment Questions

Our school district administers AIMS web assessments (both literacy and numeracy) to our students three times a year.   Personally, I feel AIMS is one useful measure in gearing instruction and assisting us in identifying the needs of our students.  However, my concern is that valuable instructional time is being devoted to “teaching to the test.”   I cringe at the amount of skill and drill that is occurring at our school.  Many teachers practice fluency by reading letters, letter sounds or nonsense words off anchor charts or practice pages (in the same format as practice probes) on a daily basis.  Some teachers have their instructional assistants pull students to work on these skills everyday, sometimes multiple times a day. The same type of practice is occurring for math. While I understand it is important to familiarize our students with the format of tests, I do not feel it is ethical to spend a substantial amount of time preparing in this way…. especially when there are so many meaningful experiences or practices that will accomplish the same goals.   We are going to be required to plan lessons together as a grade level next year.  I do not want to be required to use these practice pages as an instructional tool in my classroom. Am I wrong? I have tried to look for a clear answer on my own but I am only coming up with bits and pieces here and there.  I would appreciate any advice or guidance you can provide.

Share

• Print
• Email

Response from Carol Connor, Ph.D.:

Very interesting question. First of all, the whole point of assessing children’s nonsense word reading is to see if they can sound out words they don’t know so drilling nonsense words defeats the whole point of that particular assessment and invalidates the test. Drilling students on nonsense words essentially turns them into sight words, which, again, invalidates the assessment. Students would be much better served learning the phonics rules on real words and letting the nonsense word assessment indicate whether they have learned the rules or not.

With regard to letters, real words, and mathematics, there is a value in building fluency and so some drill and practice is appropriate. At the same time, new research is showing that students need time to build oral language skills, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension at the same time they are learning how to decode. In the study “Algorithm-Guided Individualized Reading Instruction”, first graders who participated in tailored amounts of BOTH code-focused and meaning-focused small-group instruction made greater gains in reading (and would do better on AIMS web) than first graders who received more typical first grade reading instruction.

Share

• Print
• Email