4 Ways to Use Reading Assessment Data to Inform Instruction
Reading assessment informs instruction and is an essential part of any literacy curriculum. Students enter our classrooms with different backgrounds and a wide range of literacy skills. To effectively meet the needs of our diverse learners, we need to provide targeted, differentiated instruction based on instructional needs.
Identifying instructional needs involves knowing each student’s ability to decode new words, along with their level of fluency and reading comprehension. Comprehensive literacy assessments are typically done at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. In between, regular progress monitoring helps teachers understand what’s resonating and where students might need extra support.
With regular assessment, you’ll have insightful data at your fingertips to help you target instruction to meet all students’ needs.
What Is a Reading Assessment?
Reading assessments form one part of a comprehensive assessment program. For teachers to get a broad view on student reading progress, they need to understand specific reading skills, along with phonics knowledge and writing aptitude. Within this framework, a reading assessment can help you pinpoint specific reading skills.
Some of the skills targeted in a reading assessment include:
- Letter knowledge
- Reading accuracy
- Phonemic awareness
- Phonics
- Comprehension
- Vocabulary
- Fluency
How Reading Assessments Help You Target Your Teaching
Regular assessment provides insight into student progress and yields data that will make your teaching more intentional and bolster student success. Here are four ways you can leverage reading assessment data to enhance your teaching.
1: Identify Reading Skills and Group Students According to Instructional Needs
Forming groups is an important aspect of small-group instruction. Use assessment data to make sure you are setting up your students for success and maximizing learning for each group.
For small-group instruction, it’s important to know your students’ individual reading abilities. This is particularly important at the beginning of the school year. Some students may have made great progress over the summer, while others may have experienced some summer slide. Knowing this information will make you more effective when it comes to working with your students.
2: Monitor Student Progress
It is important to determine if students are making adequate progress as they learn to read. Progress monitoring can help you know if you need to adjust instruction for your students.
Regularly monitoring student progress is also important to help you keep your groups effective. It’s common to regroup individuals regularly over the course of a school year.
Ongoing assessments can also help you identify if a student is not making progress and needs extra support from a more intensive literacy intervention.
3: Guide Instruction
Assessments can help you adjust group instruction if you find students aren’t grasping a skill or need review. Reading assessments help teachers make informed decisions for individual students.
As you review assessment data, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are students understanding what they are reading?
- Are they gaining new vocabulary and becoming more fluent?
- What kind of words are they struggling to decode?
4: Evaluate the Effectiveness of Instruction
Assessments can provide feedback to you and school administrators about the effectiveness of your literacy curriculum.
Some things to look for when analyzing student or classroom data include:
- What kind of overall progress is the student/class making?
- How does their progress compare to other students in the school?
- What is missing from what they are learning?
Back-to-School Assessments with the Digital Reader
The Digital Reader Assessment and Data Center is a vital resource that can help teachers assess students’ reading skills and monitor individual and class progress over time. The Assessment Kit contains four components:
- Reading Assessment: Determine where to start instruction for each student by evaluating their reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension. As the year progresses, additional progress monitoring assessments are available on select books throughout the Digital Reader library.
- Word Study Assessment: Gather information about student knowledge of letters, sounds, and encoding skills.
- Writing Assessment: A robust writing assessment provides you with feedback on student writing skills and recommends next steps for instruction.
- *NEW* Decoding Reading Inventory: Identify your students’ phonics focus in minutes. The inventory recommends a starting place to begin phonics instruction and selects appropriate decodable text for students to read.
Sign up for a free 2-week trial to try Digital Reader’s assessment resources for yourself! You’ll gain access to:
- Assessment and Data Center: Track student progress, identify instructional reading levels, and differentiate instruction with our easy-to-use assessment tools.
- Digital Book Library: Choose from more than 1,000 fiction, nonfiction, and decodable books to complement your instruction. Each book has been carefully crafted and illustrated to engage and challenge a wide range of readers.
- Reading Adventures: Each interactive adventure includes a word study game, a video introduction to the book, an opportunity for the student to read the book independently, and a short quiz.
Get started today to see how Digital Reader can enhance your instruction and help students improve their reading skills!
