Literacy assessment tool critique

The article that is hereby assessed titled “Early Reading Assessment: A Guiding Tool for Instruction” emphasized on the benefit of assessment as essential element of education. The article noted the diversity of the levels of students’ background and skills that could be addressed through assessments. As its basic purpose, the assessment can help identify skills and the areas that need review as well as monitor the students’ progress.

The strength and weaknesses of the article

The strength of the article is that it was clearly a product of careful study regarding how to improve the student’s reading skills.

Thus, the article not only asserts the need for assessment of the students’ skills and background in reading, but also defines its purposes which are helpful in actual classroom instruction, and offers various assessment measures towards achieving the goals of the reading instruction.

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Further strength of the article is concern about it holistic nature. That is, the article was concern on evaluating every areas of the reading instruction.

The article weaknesses however include the lack of concrete example for teachers how they could assess thoroughly the students in various fields of reading instruction. Although the article provided initial step, but how just long, as well as what to do with those students found to be lacking of what has been expected is unclear. Thus it appears that the article simply fall to the type of take it or leave it.

The uses of this tool are to encourage teachers to employ assessment as a tool towards effective reading and learning instruction.

The writers of the article capitalized on the information from previous research on the diversity of children’s reading skills to emphasize its main objective which is to promote the importance of reading assessment. Furthermore, the article use the weaknesses to encourage teacher to make an assessment not in a general sense, but on specific areas where there is perceived differences in student’s reading skills

The second article titled “Practical Assessment, Research Evaluation” which was about writing literacy that also dealt with assessment as an instrument to determine the status of literacy. First, the author discuss about the importance of writing in stimulating the students’ “higher-order thinking skills” like the ability to establish connections, comparing and contrasting solutions to problems, and satisfactorily support arguments and conclusions. The author further discuss about emergence of ideas in authentic writing assessment to which she provided three examples how the teacher could employ this assessment as tool in writing.

The strength and weaknesses of this article

The strength of this article primarily lies on the academic background of the institution which the ideas presented in the article was derived. The author stated this material was produced under the banner of the Illinois Writing Program which is committed to integrating instruction and assessment. Further strength of this article is that it is teacher oriented. That is, the teacher does not simply follow instruction but can manipulate it in order to achieve the desired objective of what the author called “authentic writing assessment.” In other words,  it provide the teacher an option how it would be implemented.

The weakness of this writing tool however, is that it seemed that it only caters to grade school and upper level of students. That is, the article is not much concern on children who are yet basic in writing particularly on how children could effectively developed writing skills. On the whole, the article provides an excellent tool for teachers in order for them to meet their classroom needs.

The use of this tool however, has been to equip teachers with the most relevant and effective means of teaching writing. The use of this tool according to Chapman was to primarily meet the classroom needs of teachers.

Reference

Early Reading assessment: A Guiding Tool for Instruction

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/14510

Chapman, C. Practical assessment, Research & Evaluation Retrieved June 2, 2010

http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=2&n=7=