It’s the beginning of the year, and a lot of us teachers will be doing lots of formal and informal assessments to figure out where our students “are.”
As Dylan Wiliam wrote in an Ed Week post yesterday:
rather than relying on commercially produced tests, teachers would be better advised to use quick surveys of student achievement. These sort of assessments could take various forms, from using single, well-designed multiple-choice questions to gauge a class’ recall of the prerequisites for the next lesson, to getting students to use finger-voting (one finger for A, two for B, and so on), to using the chat facility when teaching online. This will provide teachers with useful information about where to pitch their instruction (and also provides students with retrieval practice!).
In addition to the results helping inform our instruction, some assessments (like reading fluency passages), can be given several times during the year to help students see the progress they are making.
I thought it would be useful to share resources for reading fluency passages, and I’m adding this post to The Best Resources On Reading Fluency (Including How To Measure It).
Here are ones I’ve found that don’t appear to me to be violating any copyright laws, but I could be wrong:
My favorite is the Oral Reading Fluency Passage Generator, which will turn any passage of your choice into the typical form you find in most fluency passages.
Reading Fluency Selections are from Mr. Anker.
Achieve The Core has quite a few.
Let me know if you have other suggestions…