Assessment of Reading

Assessment of Reading

Introduction

Reading is a dynamic and complex process with a curricular history that stretches back more than 1,000 years. The practice of teaching reading has changed across the centuries as cultures moved from primarily oral traditions to written textual communication (1000 CE) to present concerns of a 21st-century technological era. During the last century, the field of reading has been driven by debates about how reading takes place and how best to teach reading in schools. Recent curricular shifts are the result of vast technological changes, the increased role of federal policy in education, and the development of diverse reading theories (Ruddell, 2004). The field of reading has shifted also as a result of a greater inclusion of curricular studies because of the need to broaden theoretical conceptions that encompass language and cultural diversity in teaching and learning. As the changing school demographic in the United States becomes more heterogeneous and linguistically diverse, curricular studies are a natural inclusion in broadening the reading theory lens. The complexity of teaching, studying, and learning to read now requires multiple theoretical models and approaches.

Teachers use variety of assessments, methods to judge the student's ability to read. The assessment of reading is presented as a recursive action, dynamic and continuous process to make way for more complex training from the reality of the student (Kamil, 2000). From this perspective, the assessment is considered as a dynamic process that should be oriented towards openness and contact with written language, immersed in a space where questions arise, answers are inferred and framed the questions with their own pedagogical practice. In this paper we have discussed importance of reading assessments and type of reading assessments that includes formal, informal, formative and summative assessments and in the last we have also compared different type of assessments.

Importance of using variety of Assessments

Reading assessments have huge importance and they are used by successful teachers for many purposes. Reading Assessments are the first step to get your child the help they need to progress and learn in school. The assessment tells you and the teachers, what are the needs of your child to learn, and how he can learn. Reading assessment demonstrates clear and direct links to motivation for teachers as well as students. All reading assessment involves interpretation. Assessment done well allows us make references from student performance in a particular place, time, and assessment task to the more broad abilities and talents that allow such achievement (Altwerger, 2007). This process of reading assessment, generalizing to student reading performance from a sample of reading demands that our inferences arc accurate and born of high confidence. The importance of accurate inferences from valid assessment information cannot be understated. Given that we assess reading to help students become better reading However, we are able to make inferences about only those things that we would sample. An incomplete assessment agenda, including one that ignores how students develop in terms of motivation, perseverance, and self-esteem in relation to reading, will limit the ...