Class Notes Journal

3-5-2010
Class Notes-
Our discussion today was about reading theorists and types of testing. Louise Rosenblatt was discussed first. She first advanced the Reader-Response Theory in 1938. Currently this theory remains a dominant teaching approach with Rosenblatt's influence readily apparent in contempory research. We also discussed Lev Vygotsky and his contribution to child development and education. He worked for the Institute of Psychology (mid 1920's). His studies involved child development and education. They also included extensive study on cognitive development of children. We discussed their contributions to education and literature. We also looked at student blogs. Claudia's blog explained important steps to testing pre-school children. These were some important areas for testing as discussed in her blog:
1. Book and Print Awareness
2. Letter Naming
3. Letter Sound
4. Phonological Awareness Including Syllables
5. Phoneme, segmenting words into syllables
6. First Sound Identification
7. Decoding single word reading
8. Listening Comprehension

Then, we discussed Laura's Blog and how she used the book, "Teaching Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons."

Chapter 1 Notes (Bell)

What is the purpose of Assessment?
The ultimate goal of all assessment information should be to create the most effective learning environment for each student. These are 4 related assessment purposes that meet that goal:
Instructional Planning-this involves specific skills mastered and not mastered, and specific areas on which to focus instruction.

Progress Monitoring- this involves screening students into categories (proficient,at-risk,and below level),measuring discrete skills such as oral reading fluency, and determining the need for more intensive instruction.

Accountability- this involves relative ranking among peers to inform parents,teachers, administrators, state and federal departments of education,and the public of congress,determining progress of diseggregated groups, determining performance of intact classes/schools to track improvement over time,and teacher effectiveness over time by monitoring classroom performance.

Special Education Eligibility- this is to determine whether there is a disability, and the best curriculum goals through writing of an Individual Educational Program (IEP).

Another major point of Chapter 1 was that The NRP concluded that "teaching phonemic awareness helps many different students to learn to read, including preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders who are just starting to learn to read." According to several researchers, knowledge of the alphabet and phonemic awareness are the two best predictors of how well children will learn to read during their first two years of reading instruction.(e.g.,Adams 1990; Christiansen 2000; Libermann1989).

For this reason I chose to test my subject on his knowledge of the alphabet and his phonemic awareness.