A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests: Knowledge is Power

Front Cover
Heinemann, 1998 - Education - 199 pages

In recent years, the increasingly high stakes attached to norm-referenced reading tests have made it harder to hold onto what we believe about language arts education. Now, Lucy Calkins, Kate Montgomery, and Donna Santman meet us in the true trenches, offering companionship and guidance in the most lonely, complex, and sometimes heartbreaking area of our teaching: preparing students for standardized reading tests.

Written with the intimacy, inspiration, and classroom-based practicality we've come to expect from The Art of Teaching Writing, A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests reflects the authors' belief that in order to be less victimized by tests, we need to be more knowledgeable about them. To that end, their book:

  • provides a complete overview of tests, showing us how to use this information to be more powerful and more articulate participants in today's political conversations and in our interactions with colleagues, parents, and our students
  • demonstrates how the methods we've come to trust in the reading and writing workshop can be built upon and adapted as we do test-preparation work with our students
  • rethinks the reading workshop in light of standardized tests, describing predictable challenges children will face when taking tests and ways we can help children develop the capabilities to meet those challenges
  • provides guidelines for reading and interpreting test results, enabling us to minimize the damage caused by troubling scores.
"If our students do well on tests," write the authors, "we are in a far stronger position to be critical of those same tests." With A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests, educators can achieve these results, and advocate for and use forms of assessment that inform teaching and support student learning.

From inside the book

 

Contents

Learning Enough to Talk
11
When a Concern for Scores Drives
31
The Overlap of Good Teaching and
49
Copyright

6 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

50th percentile achievement answer sheet asked assessment began bell curve Beverly bubbles chil child children read children's literature choose Chronicles of Narnia classroom colleagues criterion-referenced criterion-referenced tests curriculum Darling-Hammond dents develop district office dren example explained fact feel Gary Paulsen goals grade help children important instruction Jacqueline Jacqueline Jones Jasmine Kathleen Tolan kids knew knowledge literacy literature-based look makers Malik minilessons NAEP National norm norm-referenced tests parents percent practice test problem progress quartile ques raw scores read the passage read the questions readers reading scores reading workshop realized score report skills sometimes standardized reading tests standardized tests standards-based stanines story strategies sustained silent reading teaching reading test booklet test preparation test scores test takers test-taking testing day things thought tions told turn watched whole language words wrong York

About the author (1998)

Lucy Calkins is the Founding Director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. For more than thirty years, she has led the Project in its dual functions as a think tank, developing state-of-the-art teaching methods, and a provider of professional development, supporting hundreds of thousands of teachers, principals, superintendents, and policy-makers across the country and around the world. Lucy is the author or coauthor - and series editor - of the reading, writing, and phonics Units of Study series, which are integral to classroom life in tens of thousands of schools around the world. In addition, she has authored scores of professional books and articles. Lucy is also the Robinson Professor of Children's Literature at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she co-directs the Literacy Specialist Program. Her latest professional books include Teaching Writing and Leading Well. Visit UnitsofStudy.com Order Resources by Lucy Calkins Kate Montgomery teaches reading and writing in Harlem, New York. Prior to this, she was a Peace Corps literacy educator in Kenya and teacher of English in Czechoslovakia. Kate has been a lead researcher in all of the Teachers College Reading Project's work in New York City schools and has played a major role in shaping the Project's thinking about the teaching of reading. Donna Santman is a middle-school literacy teacher and reading coach at Intermediate School 89 in New York City. A former staff developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Donna consults with schools around the country, supporting teachers in developing and implementing rigorous reading and writing workshops as well as supporting schools in thinking about literacy needs across the curriculum. She is coauthor of A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests (Heinemann, 1998). Beverly Falk is Professor of Education and Head of the Graduate Programs in Early Childhood Education at The City College of New York, The City University of New York. She currently edits The New Educator and has authored The Heart of the Matter (Heinemann, 2000) and coauthored A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Tests (Heinemann 1998) and Authentic Assessment in Action (Teachers College Press, 1995).

Bibliographic information

TitleA Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests: Knowledge is Power
AuthorsLucy Calkins, Kate Montgomery, Donna Santman, Beverly Falk
PublisherHeinemann, 1998
Original fromthe University of Michigan
DigitizedJan 26, 2010
ISBN032500000X, 9780325000008
Length199 pages
Subjects ›  ›  › 

Education / Language Experience Approach
Education / Schools / Levels / Elementary
Education / Teacher Training & Certification
Education / Teaching / Subjects / Reading & Phonics
Education / Testing & Measurement
Juvenile Nonfiction / Language Arts / General
Language Arts & Disciplines / Reading Skills
  
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