Literacy Assessment in September!

There has been a lot of chat on some FB groups about ‘missed Standardised Testing’ and how schools will catch up with this in the Autumn term. Granted there is some value in ST to get a class overview on SOME aspects of pupil performance (on one day). Take for example in Literacy, what information do we gain? A reading age, an assessment of their vocabulary, comprehension and overview of their ability to decode pseudo words. It seems like a lot. But it does not however assess other and in my opinion, more important components of Literacy such as reading fluency, written vocabulary and oral language skills. In September, my focus will be on gathering information that will directly inform my teaching and benefit the pupils. I will do Running Records to assess reading rate, accuracy, intonation, expression which will also help me assess comprehension. I will do a writing vocabulary test (splurge) to see what words each pupil has brought to fluency. I will do some dictation to assess their writing at sentence level (spacing, punctuation aswell as auditory skills). I will do a reading age test (Schonell-free online), there may be gaps in word identification skills for some children. And most importantly of all, I will do a reading and writing survey to see how my pupils FEEL about these aspects of Literacy. I will use all of this information to form my groups. My groups will not be static and will vary depending on our focus. Who knows what our kids will be like when they return to us? My main priority will be to help all the children settle and help them get ready for literacy learning through fun, interactive ways to motivate them to want to read and write. In my experience some pupils find the whole process of standardised testing very stressful. Just some food for thought!