Imagine It

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Imagine It!

• Assessment

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• Standardized classroom assessment whereby
  students overall competence is measured.
• The testing methods and content of general
  outcome measurement remain constant over the
  course of the academic year.
• Each test is of equivalent difficulty and
  represents competence in the entire school years
  curriculum.

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Assessment

• The assessment system of Imagine It! consists of
  
• Screening
• Progress monitoring
• Diagnosis

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Imagine It!Formal Assessment System

• Benchmark Assessments
• For all students
• Given regularly throughout the year
• Lesson Assessments
• For all students
• Weekly
• Progress monitoring and diagnostic

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Benchmark Assessments

• Administrated at the beginning of the year for
  screening.
• Administrated after every unit to show student
  mastery of the curriculum and identify students
  at risk for failure.
• Benchmark test assess(depending on grade level)
• Phonics
• High-frequency word recognition
• Vocabulary
• Spelling
• Grammar, usage and mechanics
• Comprehension
• Fluency

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Benchmark AssessmentUnit Cutoffs

• Schedule 1 at the start of the year for
  screening and then 1 after every unit.
• Benchmark Skills
• Phonics
• High-Frequency Word Recognition
• Grammar, Usage and Mechanics
• Spelling
• Comprehension
• Vocabulary
• Oral Fluency Passage Reading

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Lesson Assessment

• Lesson Assessments are given weekly.
• Lesson Skills
• Phonics
• Grammar, Usage and Mechanics
• Comprehension
• Selection Vocabulary
• Writing
• Oral Fluency
• Spelling

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• Two basic approaches to general outcome
  measurement
• Curriculum-Sampling Approach
• Skills that constitute the annual curriculum are
  specified
• A set of procedures for measuring each skill
• The proportion of each item type is determined so
  that each test samples the various skills to
  reflect the relative importance of each skill

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• Each alternate form of the test is created the
  same way.
• The difficulty and content of the test remain
  constant and we expect the students scores to
  gradually increase over the course of the year.
• Incorporated into the Benchmark Assessments with
  the 100-point Skills Battery.

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• The Performance Indicator Approach
• A single task for measurement that is correlated
  with the various skills addressed in the annual
  curriculum.
• The content and difficulty of the task remains
  constant across the school year although the
  testing material differs across alternate forms
  of the test.
• Example- passage reading fluency
• Although this is a direct measure of oral reading
  fluency, it also functions well as an indicator
  of a students overall reading competence.

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• Formal assessment is addressed in the form of
  Benchmark Assessments and Lesson Assessments
• The Benchmark and Lesson Assessments incorporate
  the performance indicator approach with their
  Fluency Assessments

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• Measures have been validated to accurately
  reflect overall reading competence and those
  measures differ by grade level.
• Kindergarten
• Phoneme segmentation- The examiner says a word,
  the student says its constituent sounds
• Rapid letter naming- The examiner presents a page
  of lower- and upper-case letters randomly
  ordered- students says as many as they can in one
  minute
• Letter-sound fluency- The examiner presents a
  page with lower- and upper-case letters randomly
  ordered, this time the student says sounds for
  one minute

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• First Grade
• Combining nonsense word fluency and passage
  reading- Students begin with nonsense word
  fluency and move to the more difficult passage
  fluency where students are presented with
  grade-level text and they read aloud for one
  minute.
• Word identification fluency- Students read as
  many words as possible in one minute.
• The advantage of nonsense word fluency is that it
  maps onto beginning decoding instruction.
• The downside of the nonsense word fluency/passage
  reading fluency combination is that getting a
  good picture of development over the course of
  first grade is problematic because teachers
  cannot compare scores collected in the first half
  of the year.

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• Second - Fourth Grade
• Passage reading fluency measure provides the
  strongest source of information on reading
  development as a form of performance indicator
  general outcome measurement.
• Each week one test is administered with the
  student reading aloud from a different but
  equivalent passage for one minute.
• The examiner counts the number of words read
  correctly within the one-minute time frame.
• The reliability,validity, and instructional
  utility of this simple measure have been
  demonstrated repeatedly.

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Assessment General Outcome
Measurement

• Fifth- Sixth Grade
• Research indicates that the validity of the
  passage reading fluency performance indicator
  begins to decrease somewhere around Grade 5.
• So, beginning in the 5th grade (or in Grade 4 for
  high-performing schools), teachers should
  consider using a different measure that more
  directly taps comprehension.
• One alternative for the higher grades is maze
  fluency. With maze fluency students are
  presented with a passage from which approximately
  every seventh word has been deleted and replaced
  with three possible replacements, only one of
  which is semantically tenable.
• Demonstrates strong reliability and validity and
  models reading development beginning at Grade 4
  and continuing through grade 8.

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Assessment 3 Types of Formal Classroom
Assessment

• Screening
• Progress monitoring
• Diagnosis

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Assessment
Screening

• Screening is the process of measuring all
  students in a class to identify the subset of
  students who, without special attention, are in
  danger of scoring poorly on the end-of-year
  high-stakes tests and long-term reading failure.

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Assessment
Screening

• Students are identified as having potential
  problems early.
• Teachers can then allocate special attention to
  these students as quickly as possible. (Catch-up
  Time)
• Once a screening assessment has been selected, a
  cut-point is determined.
• Performing below the cut-point signals the
  teacher to pay extra attention to this student.
• When periodic screening is used, the cut-point on
  each subsequent screening gradually increases.

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Assessment Progress
Monitoring

• SRA Imagine It! uses the term progress monitoring
  to refer to specifically systematic formal
  assessments in which students are assessed on a
  regular basis.
• Teachers can use results from progress
  monitoring
• To formulate decision about how to make
  classroom-level instruction more responsive to
  individual student needs
• To determine whether a student is responding
  adequately to the instructional program
• For students who are unresponsive to validated or
  researched-based instructional program, to
  inductively design individualized instructional
  plans

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Assessment Progress
Monitoring

• In most reading programs, progress monitoring is
  accomplished via mastery measurement. SRA
  Imagine It! does not use mastery measurement.
• With mastery measurement, teachers assess mastery
  of a sequence of skills.
• Most basal reading assessments provide unit test
  to assess mastery of skills addressed in each
  unit. Nevertheless, research indicates that few
  classroom teachers adhere to mastery rules, based
  on those tests, for advancing students to new
  instructional content.
• High-stakes tests do not rely on single-skill
  measurement.

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Assessment Progress
Monitoring

• Benchmark Assessments- 6 or 7 administered
  through out year
• Student will encounter 5 lesson assessments
  before the next Benchmark assessment which will
  allow the teacher to use the information to
  reinforce the opinion of a students at-risk
  status or it can provide data of growth and
  greater comfort within instructional strands.
• Not all students receive fluency progress
  monitoring. Weekly progress monitoring for those
  students who do can help teachers gain insight
  about the effectiveness of their attempts at
  remediation for these at-risk students.
• Once a student is designated as at risk they
  should receive weekly progress monitoring for the
  remainder of the year even if the student scores
  above the risk cut-point on a subsequent
  screening.

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Assessment
Diagnosis

• Diagnosis means assessment that describes a
  students strengths and weaknesses with respect
  to skills or strategies.
• Goal is to identify productive targets for
  instruction
• A curriculum-sampling approach to general outcome
  measurements provides teachers with a strong
  basis for describing students strengths and
  weaknesses in the curriculum because all the
  skills embedded in the annual curriculum are
  assessed on each testing occasion

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Assessment
Diagnosis

• Because each of the segments of the Benchmark
  Assessments provide a separate score in each of
  the strands of the curriculum, they can be used
  to identify the specific curriculum areas that
  are strengths or weaknesses for a student or
  across a classroom.
• If students score below the cutoff for any
  Benchmark Assessment, use one or more of the
  following options to help students get back on
  track
• Re-teach
• Intervention
• Workshop
• Leveled Readers

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Assessment Benchmark
Assessments

• Benchmark Assessments show how students
  knowledge of essential skills grows over the
  course of the year as these benchmarks are
  periodically administered. Each Benchmark
  Assessment is of equivalent difficulty, content
  covered, and question formats and each samples
  the entire years curriculum.

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Assessment Benchmark
Assessments

• At each grade level there are periodic Benchmark
  Assessments.
• Kindergarten and grade 1 6 assessments
• Grades 2-6 7
  assessments
• Assessments are timed
• One assessment is administered at the beginning
  of the year and then one after each unit the
  remainder of the year.

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Assessment Benchmark
Assessments

• The specific test items vary from assessment to
  assessment.
• Rising test scores reflect increased student
  competence in the curriculum.
• These assessments differ from traditional
  assessments that
• cover only the material in the most recently
  taught unit
• become increasingly difficult over the course of
  a school year

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Assessment Benchmark
Assessments

• Benchmark Assessments include the following
  components
• 100- Point Skills Battery- Students answer
  questions relating to comprehension, vocabulary,
  grammar, usage, and mechanics, spelling, phonics,
  and phonemic-phonological awareness. Each strand
  has been assigned a weight in accordance with its
  importance in the curriculum to reach the total
  of 100 points.
• Fluency Assessment- A general overall indicator
  of a students reading ability.
• Writing Assessment- Grades 2-6 , a writing
  assessment is included with the first, fourth,
  and seventh Benchmark Assessments. These prompts
  are similar to the type of prompt found in
  high-stakes tests.

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Assessment Benchmark
Assessments

• At the beginning of the year and then
  periodically throughout the year, any student who
  falls below the cutoff score on the 100-Point
  Skills Battery, Fluency Assessment, and
  Expository Writing Assessment should be
  considered for intervention. That students
  progress should be closely monitored through
  weekly fluency assessments.

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Assessment Lesson
Assessments

• Lesson Assessments at the end of each lesson
  assess students understanding of the
  instructional content and the literature in each
  lesson. They cover the most important skills
  featured in the lesson of a given unit-skills
  that are closely related to reading success and
  are typically in state and national standards.

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Assessment Lesson
Assessments

• These assessments will help you determine how
  well students are grasping the skills and
  concepts as they are taught and will help inform
  you about any additional instruction they might
  need.

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Assessment Lesson
Assessments

• As students complete each lesson, they will be
  assessed on their understanding of the
  instructional content and the literature in each
  lesson.
• The results of the assessments will then be used
  to inform subsequent instruction.
• The Lesson Assessments are in a structure similar
  to that of the Benchmark Assessments in terms of
  assessments sections that equal 100-points, a
  fluency assessment, and a writing assessment.

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Assessment Informal Assessment
Opportunities

• Informal Assessment throughout the Teachers
  Edition provides tips for informal assessment on
  a daily basis for each part of the lesson. These
  include
• decoding skills
• vocabulary
• comprehension
• grammar- usage, and mechanic skills
• listening, speaking, viewing
• handwriting skills.

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Assessment

• Because a one time-screening assessment,
  especially at kindergarten and first grade,
  typically makes too many errors of these types,
  SRA suggest that the initial screening assessment
  constitute only the first step in the process
  designating risk status.