While a good test should assess how well students may have processed targeted learning skills, the only way to ensure students are engaged and on-task is by mapping those original skills against the student progress.
Mapping provides teachers with concrete evidence as they assess how to improve students' learning and ultimately, teacher's instruction. This process involves first mapping problematic areas of student learning and then using that targeted information to engage their students more effectively.
Teachers Map Problematic Areas of Student Learning
After marking the test, teachers should begin to notice those specific skill sets that caused students difficulty. In reading for example, this could be deeper comprehension, decoding and word recognition. In areas of early reading skills for example, teachers can consider the following questions:
- What phonic skills can the student use?
- Is the student able to decode multisyllabic words?
- Can the student read words that have prefixes and/or suffixes?
- How did the students' word recognition compare with their comprehension?
- How did the students' word recognition compare with their comprehension?
- Is the student ready to read material on a mainstream level?
Teachers can then use new targeted assessment goals to reflect classroom learning and assessment.
Diversifying Instruction Using a Variety of Learning Contexts
Teachers can provide more targeted areas of practice in a variety of engaging learning contexts, such as pair or group work, that are also favorable to the classroom dynamics. For example, if a student is still struggling with decodable skills, teachers can provide students with decodable texts, work on reading targeted vocabulary and sound blends in isolation and within word contexts. All this can be done using a cooperative learning technique such as jigsaw learning, providing students can handle this type of group work.
Implications for Differentiated Instruction
Students acquire various reading skills at different rates. When students are experiencing difficulty, teachers should emphasize effort that will help students complete the activity more successfully. If a task is too difficult, no learning can take place. In bridging word-text skills for example, teachers can appeal to various learning groups in terms of using the same reading comprehension skills but with different learning tasks. For example, a lower performing group scans a text for names of people and places. They should remember to look for words beginning with capital letters. They can then classify them according to groups of "names" and "people." The middle group lists names of people, places and numbers and what they refer to and the stronger group underlines five unknown words. They guess the meanings and confirm their answers in the dictionary.
In engaging learners more effectively, teachers should consider mapping problematic areas of student difficulty to ensure complete integrity and accountability in learning tasks, as they prepare their students for the next test.
Dorit Sasson - Hello! I'm an ESL instructor, teacher diversity coach and writer for the educational markets who writes on English language learners ...
