Category: Assessment

The LEGO Conundrum

Last week, we began a new round of professional development. One of our School Improvement Goals is to increase the number of students proficient in evidence and elaboration in their writing. In our most recent round of ILEARN testing (the test used in our state to check student proficiency in math and ELA in grades 3-8), only slightly more than 17% showed proficiency in this area. Our working theory is that by helping our students expand their sentences, add more details, and ensure that those details stay on topic, we will also see improvement in other areas of the written portion of the test.

But I also know that when I bring together a group of teachers ranging from kindergarten to fourth grade, some may have difficulty connecting to the data they see on the screen because “we don’t teach those standards.” To help get thinking about each person’s critical role in moving our students towards proficiency, we did an activity with one of my all-time favorite toys, LEGO! Each group received a box with a Minifigure inside, and then we put the following directions on the screen:

We asked one person to follow a step in the directions, revealing them one at a time and then passing the Minifigure to the next person. Once all tables had completed their Minifigures, we displayed the question: Which step could you skip and still have a completed Minifigure? The team reached a consensus that there were no steps we could forget and that we still had completed Minifigures.

So then, we showed this:

I know the font is tiny, so don’t feel you need to zoom in. This is a vertical articulation guide for the essential writing standards for grades K-4. At first glance, without even digging into what they say, you might notice that they become more detailed as the grades advance. When we looked at this with our staff, several noted that they built upon one another. Suppose you were to look at the third row related to writing informative pieces—every grade level talks about being on a topic or having a central idea, and every grade level has something about including details, but the requirements and expectations of each grade level become more detailed.

The analogy we made as we discussed this is that we think of the writing process as a stairstep. Each grade level has a target level of proficiency. If one grade level does not hit their proficiency level, the work of the following grades becomes more challenging because they have to play “catch-up” with their students.

The State of Indiana has provided rubrics that are written based on the academic standards, and they are broken down into the different categories that students are assessed on during the writing portion of the ILEARN assessment. They include three focus areas – organization, evidence and elaboration, and conventions. So, we started by looking at the rubric section based on evidence and elaboration (our goal area). Unfortunately, since the ILEARN rubric only includes grades 3-8, we didn’t have a clear rubric for grades K-2 in this area. So, our leadership team had done some prework. We dug into the standards and rubrics from grades three & four and then walked the rubrics back, referencing what was included in the standards in each grade level, to create a simple bullet-pointed rubric for all grades K-4.

What we came up with was something that looked like this:

Next, we sent each grade level team to dig into their standards, the academic frameworks put together by the state, and the prework our lead team had done. We then took time to define success criteria. We asked ourselves, “What should my students’ writing look like to show they have met proficiency in the areas we’ve identified?” To ensure we clearly understood what proficient writing should look like, we utilized the Vermont Writing Collaborative writing samples, which had been scored based on common core standards. These standards are very close to the ones that we use in Indiana. My favorite thing about these samples is that when you look at the scored samples, there is information on the page about why they fall into the category they did on the rubric. Then, the person who scored it wrote a short section called “Final Thoughts,” which helped us better understand what to look for to show proficiency on the standard.

Moving forward, we will use these rubrics and success criteria to identify where our students currently fall in evidence and evaluation on a cold write (a piece of writing that our students have not had any direct instruction or support to write) and then plan instructional strategies that will support their needs. It was important to us to look at cold writes instead of a piece that the students may have been working on as part of a current unit because that will give us an idea of what our students can do entirely on their own without any direct teaching to support the writing process.

Much like building a LEGO, the writing process is a step-by-step learning process so that students may grow in the vertical articulation of the standard. No step can be missed for our students to get to proficiency. The scores on the ILEARN assessment are often tied to the classroom or grade level that took the assessment. I want our teachers to be fully aware that without the foundational steps that must happen in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, our students will never get to proficiency in grades three & four. Those scores represent our work to build a student as a writer. If you skip a page in your LEGO instructions, you will encounter problems later in the build. At the same time, if we miss a step in building proficient writers, our students will struggle as they age.

What are your thoughts? Have you, like me, ever been leading a professional development and felt like some weren’t fully engaged because the data “wasn’t from their grade level?” Have you ever been the one who disengaged? How might you think differently about your role moving forward? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Guide to Assessments in Multi-Tiered Systems of Support

At a recent Collaboration Network for the Indiana Literacy Cadre, we discussed the pivotal role of assessments in the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) process. Our session, led by Tracy Hastings, the Executive Director of Education and Early Literacy Initiatives from the Ivy Tech Community College, was a massive support for understanding the different types of assessments and their role. We discovered that assessments are not just tools for evaluating students but also for guiding the next steps in instruction.

One of the resources she shared with us is this chart:

LD@school, a project of the Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario, created the chart. What I love is that it breaks down the different types of assessments and their uses. As a reminder, assessments are about more than just evaluating a student. They are also tools that teachers should use to help guide the next steps in instruction.

Let’s examine each assessment type and its uses, starting with Universal Screeners. These assessments are typically used three times per year (beginning, middle, and end) to identify students or systems that are at risk. These brief assessments measure a student’s performance on a standardized scale. They often give us scores in a percentile range and are given to all students. Screeners can be used to help catch students who are struggling early. One misconception about universal screeners is that the data may be used to help us group students with similar scores for an intervention. The problem is that a Universal Screener often checks various skills, and two students with similar scores have very different needs for intervention. You can think of the universal screener as being like a blood pressure or temperature check. These might tell a doctor that something is wrong, but not what is wrong. When planning tiered interventions for students, you need more information than just the universal screener. Universal screeners can also help identify some potential issues with the core curriculum to ensure that it meets the needs of all students. Our district uses DIBELS and NWEA MAP assessments as universal screeners, although other districts might use Acadience, Aimsweb, FastBridge, or easyCBM.

As I said, the Universal Screener may give us an idea that a student is at risk, but that’s not enough information to know how to solve that problem. Just like how your doctor might do more tests if your blood pressure or temperature is too high or too low, when a Universal Screener tells us that a student is struggling, we next need to do some Diagnostic Assessments to learn more about the child’s needs. A diagnostic will help us to pinpoint specific areas of difficulty. We only use these assessments with students who are at risk to help us identify what the problem is and what intervention or differentiated instruction would best support the learner. Sometimes, we might be tempted to give all the diagnostics to all our students to know more about them. The problem is that it would take too much time from our Tier 1 instruction to do this. If a school’s Tier 1 instruction is where it needs to be, we should only see about 20% or less of our students falling in the at-risk category.

Recently, I’ve been having a lot of conversations about making sure that what we do to support our learners in Tier 2 or Tier 3 is making sure that we are in alignment – meaning that the needs of the child and where they fall in the progression of skills are in alignment with the intervention or differentiated instruction. That way, we know that we are meeting the needs of the child in front of us. Based on the diagnostic, you may find that two students with very similar scores on the Universal Screener have vastly different needs once you do the diagnostic assessments. We’ve been using the CORE Phonics Survey, the LETRS Spelling Assessment, and the PAST in our building. Other diagnostics might include the Really Great Reading Phonological Awareness Survey or the Acadience Comprehension, Fluency, and Oral Language Diagnostic.

Two more types of assessments are considered assessments for learning. First, there’s progress monitoring. These assessments are generally given weekly or bi-weekly and help track student progress and the effectiveness of interventions. Since they are given regularly, they can allow teachers to adjust interventions or increase the intensity of support quickly. If we find students have made progress, we might gradually reduce the intervention or shift to a different intervention that moves them along the learning progression. The last assessment for learning I will discuss here is formative. These assessments are what we use to have ongoing feedback during instruction. This might include things like quizzes, discussions, and exit tickets. These assessments allow us to make sure our Tier 1 instruction is effective for all our learners.

I wanted to dig into assessments today because we must understand the reason for and value of each of the various types of assessments for learning. As educators, we must be prepared to use multiple tools to identify what is causing students to struggle and how well our interventions or instruction meets their needs. Hopefully, this post will provide you with a better understanding of the different types of assessments which in turn will help you find better alignment in your MTSS process. If you don’t know what may be available in your district, there should be people you could turn to for support. In our building, the literacy coach is an excellent resource. If you don’t have a literacy coach, a school psychologist might be another person to help you understand how you might best support your learners. By utilizing assessments these various assessments, you can create a data-informed MTSS framework that meets the various needs of all students.

So again, let’s go back to the analogy of the visit to the doctor’s office:

  • Universal Screeners: The things they do at every appointment for every patient, check you blood pressure and temperature, use the oximeter to measure pulse and oxygen saturation, etc. These things may be a sign of general health, or a sign of a potential problem.
  • Diagnostic: When the doctor notices a problem, they may order some additional tests. Things like an EKG, or a blood test, will give the doctor additional information to help identify the problem.
  • Formative: These are the check-ups along the way after you’ve been given a treatment plan. Your doctor might schedule a few follow-ups to see how things are going.

Have you had previous experiences with these various types of assessments? What have you noticed? How have diagnostics helped you improve your support for students? Let us know in the comments below!

The Basic Questions

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of research and learning on how to best meet the needs of our students. In LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling), I’ve come to understand just how important assessments are for us to know two things – first, they help us know where our students are, and second, they help us know what we need to do next to help our students to grow.

When looking at assessments, LETRS suggests that there are 4 basic questions that we should answer based on the various assessments and the data we collect. Those questions are:

In today’s post, I’ll dig into those questions more to support you when looking at student data. We want to all be on the same page about these things because one of the biggest takeaways, as I learn more about the Science of Reading, is that prevention and early intervention have the greatest impact on avoiding potential reading difficulties. To help with these goals, we should screen our students in grades K-2 individually three times per year with a valid, reliable, and efficient assessment to flag any students who are making inadequate progress in reading. We should be using the results of those screeners to answer the four questions listed above.

Who needs help? – Our initial guide for those who need help should be driven by our academic standards. As an administrator in Indiana, my go-to resource is the Indiana Academic Standards Vertical Articulation Guide. You can find the K-2 version here, or you can get the 2-5 version here. If you live in a different state, look to see if your Department of Education has something similar, or you could utilize your academic standards. In addition to standards, there are other resources that you could use. Your curricular resources typically have a scope and sequence. If you’ve checked how well your resource aligns with your academic standards and know that the resource is highly aligned, then that scope and sequence will help. Another resource you might want to look at is the scope and sequence of a resource such as LETRS. You can find this scope and sequence here. This tool might help you know when most typical students will be ready for a specific skill as a reader, and then as a speller (quick side-note on this – these grade levels are approximate – we know all students develop in different ways at different times, but this can be a good tool to compare to the scope and sequence of your resources, and can serve as a support if there are students who are far off the benchmark). A final tool that can be beneficial in identifying where students should be is the Progression of Word Study, also created by LETRS:

So… to be able to identify just who needs help, we need to look at the students in your class and their data. If there are students who are not meeting the benchmarks of your screeners, that should raise a red flag. If you have a student performing below most other students in your class, that should raise a red flag. And finally, if more than a typical proportion of a class is not meeting the benchmark, that should raise a red flag.

What kind of help do they need? – Once we’ve identified our students who need help, the next goal is how to help them. If that student is below the benchmark, it’s time to do a diagnostic assessment. Recently, the leadership team in my building has been looking at the LETRS Phonics and Word-Reading Survey as a potential tool for diagnostic screening (accessible here). What we like about it is that it’s organized according to the progression of phonic elements. For most students, it will take 5-10 minutes to complete. Once you reach a point of frustration for the student, you stop. When you fill out the summary chart, you should have a clearer picture of where the student’s phonics and phonemic awareness have broken down. Once you know that, you can decide on an intervention for your student, and where you might want to start them.

In our school, we use UFLI Foundations as our core resource for structured literacy, and for most students, it will become our primary tool for Tier 2 Interventions. When we have completed the diagnostic we’d look at the UFLI scope and sequence to identify what lesson might help fill in the gaps for that student. Ideally, I’d form a small group of 3-5 students at a similar level for this work. In our building, we’ve been utilizing a shared RTI time across grade levels to make this happen. Each PLC team can look at their students of concern, group them based on need, and decide which teacher will pull which group for support. If all is going well in your Tier 1 instruction, then this should be around 15-25% of your students who need extra support, which results in a reasonably sized small group.

Once we identify our intervention, and where the students need to start on that intervention, it’s time to create some short-term goals. We’ve been setting goals of approximately 6-8 weeks in the SMART goal format. An example of this SMART goal might look like this: By ___(date)__, __(student name)__ will be able to __(skill)__ using __(intervention)__ as measured by __(Progress Monitoring Tool)__. These clear goals help us know what our students are working on and identify opportunities for early wins with each child.

Is the help helping? – At this point, we’ve identified our students of concern and created groups of students to work with on specific skills. Now it’s time for us to implement a plan of progress monitoring. These assessments should be short, formative assessments that allow teachers to make instructional decisions. Recently, we have been using Aimsweb Plus as our Progress Monitoring tool. Ultimately, the progress monitoring should tell us more about the validity of the intervention and its teaching than it tells us about the student.

If not, what needs to change? – So now we’ve done all the previous steps, screeners have been used, areas of need identified, interventions implemented, and progress monitoring is utilized every 1-3 weeks. Now it’s time to think about what to do for a student who is not growing as we’d like. If a student seems stagnant on the goal after a few rounds of Progress Monitor data, we must change the instructional plan for that student to better meet their needs. This is why we want to set a short-term (6-8 weeks) goal, and then check on student progress towards that goal regularly. If their data does not show growth toward their target, it’s time to do additional digging. In our school, this is where we’d set up a Child Study Team. That team includes the teacher, support staff who work with the students, our instructional coaches, and our administrators. Based on the conversations around the table, we might use an additional screener, put into place a different intervention, or shift the skill we’re working on within the intervention.

Again, the goal is to identify our students who need help, assess what kind of help they need, put that help into place, and make changes as needed. These steps will help us be ready to intervene as early as possible. The earlier we intervene, the easier it will be to close gaps. Ultimately, our goal is 95% proficiency by the end of 3rd grade. That can’t happen unless we look for those red flags in our students and take the appropriate steps.

As you reflect on your students, who raises a red flag for you? What steps should you take to help them be better prepared for next year? What goals could you put into place now to help next year’s teachers better support the students you’re thinking of? Let’s go do it! The sooner we intervene, the better we can support our students!