Video Analysis on Assessing Reading Skills

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDZlUXUwRYk&feature=related

From this weeks reading I was able to follow along with this video very well. In the video the student is a slow reader because of her decoding skills. The student, Becca, is a very highly ranked math student but is only performing in the 12th percentile for reading. The assessor is trying to diagnose where Becca's problems lie. Her teacher through evaluating the student realized that Becca was falling behind so she wanted to get her more explicit help. I personally thought it was interesting that in order to assess the reader they used a list of words. In the past semester for our endorsement, we learned a lot about how reading isn't just reading words but making sense of what we are reading. I think you can gauge more about a students' abilities from when they are reading a coherent passage. I had some students last year who were excellent readers but when I had to test them on sight words they would miss the odd word, whereas when I chose to use the sight words in a passage they were able to get through the passage without making any mistakes. I think this shows that the reader is proficient because in context they are able to decode unfamiliar words more easily. I don't enjoy reading words in a list either. I think this also gives the student a lot of pressure. I think.

Ongoing assessment is mentioned in the video and throughout the text. It's important to be aware of how each student is performing in order to explicitly teach to the needs of the students. I thought it was interesting when the text stated "most students need help in acquiring reading skills and strategies; they do not gain these through osmosis" (Opitz, 24). I would hope that all teachers know this because it is our job to make sure we don't assume that students already know strategies and teach them to our students. I thought the video did a good job of explaining why we are to diagnose our students early so that they don't fall behind their peers. Reading is an area of school that can bring about very negative feelings toward school as a whole if they are not successful. Reading is supposed to be fun and exciting to students so as educators we need to strive to get all students to that level through modeling our own reading behaviors.

Opitz, M., Rubin, D., & Erekson, J. (2011). Reading diagnosis and improvement: Assessment and instruction. (6^th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon