State of the Art: Reading - November 1993
               10. The most valuable form of reading assessment reflects
our current understanding about the reading process and simulates 
authentic reading tasks.
The optimist says assessment will drive instruction in the future and 
new and better assessments are being developed to do this job. But the 
cautious optimist says this will only happen if educators at all levels 
understand the difference between sound and unsound assessment and can 
integrate sound assessments into the instruction process in effective
ways.
                                       (Stiggins and Conklin 1992, p. 3)
Until very recently reading assessment focused on measuring students' 
performance on a hierarchy of isolated skills that, when put together, 
were thought to compose "reading." Now it is known that the whole act of
reading is greater than the sum of its parts (i.e., isolated skills).
Moreover, these parts are interrelated within a literacy context and do 
not always develop in a hierarchical way. The discrete skills concept 
has been replaced with the current constructive, interactive view on 
literacy learning. This perspective grew out of recent research on 
cognition that revolutionized what we know about learning. However, by 
and large, practices in literacy assessment have not kept pace with what
is known about literacy learning, although they are beginning to change.
The role of standardized tests in the literacy program is likely to 
remain important. Because state and local school districts are likely to
continue using norm-referenced, standardized tests to evaluate literacy 
programs, state tests and the National Assessment of Educational 
Progress (NAEP) are undergoing substantial changes. The majority of 
these changes involve creating authentic assessments--appraisals that 
account for critical aspects of reading and that parallel everyday 
reading tasks. Changes that are moving assessment closer to simulating 
authentic reading tasks include: using unabridged text directly from the
original source for assessing meaning construction; accounting for 
students' prior knowledge before reading; incorporating samples 
(portfolios) of student work; and making student self-assessment part of
the standardized testing program.
Literacy assessments done in the classroom that involve performance 
tasks are beginning to provide valuable information needed to direct 
instructional decision making. Many teachers are turning to portfolio 
assessments that include multiple measures taken over time of individual
students' reading and writing. Well-constructed portfolios contain 
samples of student work, including representative pieces of work in 
progress and exceptional pieces, students' reflection about their work, 
and evaluation criteria. For example, pieces of students' writing in 
which they share their thinking and feeling about their reading--text 
analyses from their own point of view--may be included in portfolios. 
Creating and using performance assessments as alternatives and/or 
supplements to norm-referenced tests are helping to transform reading 
instruction and learning in today's state-of-the-art classroom.
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[Children's reading and writing abilities develop together.]   
--- GEcho 1.11+
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