Accurately Assessing Reading Levels

 At first glance, the use of leveled texts in the classroom seems like a helpful tool for students as they progress through the reading levels. While the leveled materials do have value to emergent readers, there are quite a few pitfalls that can easily turn a learning experience into an inadequate practice. Many teachers ignore the fluidity of reading levels and treat them as rigid boundaries, not allowing students to progress at a pace that is natural for them. That being said, Kathy Glasswell and Michael Ford argue that progress is not equivalent to proficiency in their article Let’s Start Leveling about Leveling. In their opinion, educators can be quick to hail progress through the levels in guided reading as proficiency. This kind of assessment can lead to problems such as they saw with half of a school’s fourth grade class reading below grade level. Educators must design a reading curriculum that accelerates the progress of below-grade-level readers to help them catch-up with proficient readers and not widen the gap between them. This gap can easily grow wider as proficient readers read longer and denser texts. Stronger readers get more practice at reading words, as weaker readers struggle to keep up. Though leveled materials are not inherently bad for the classroom, using leveled reading without an understanding of how to use reading assessment data can have negative effects.

Knowing your students' abilities and how you as an educator can make reading exciting and educational is a step in the right direction. The process of getting to know your students and assessing their literacy skills can be a daunting prospect. A helpful tool to guide educators in the right direction is the spider chart. Karen E. Wohlwend explains how to use miscue analysis along with spider charts to more effectively chart students’ reading abilities in her article A New Spin on Miscue Analysis: Using Spider Charts to Web Reading Processes. By analyzing assessment data and plotting it on spider charts, it gives educators a visual representation of a student’s reading abilities at that particular moment. This is extremely helpful when educators are planning their next lessons and will allow them to personalize their teaching, as students will inevitably be at different levels of reading. I have seen this information being collected in my field experience classroom; however, having the assessment data plotted on a spider chart would be much more useful than endless rows of data. While raw data can be difficult to extrapolate from, charts add another dimension to viewing how students are working with cueing systems and highlighting where they need assistance.