QRI-5 and DIBELS

QRI-5 is an informal literacy assessment that is used to measure a variety of different literacy skills including fluency, automaticity, word identification, and comprehension.  These assessments can be used for students pre-primer through high school.  QRI-5 can be used to assess student strengths and weakness, to pinpoint precise reading behavior or habits, to assess student growth over a period of time, and to help teachers create student specific lessons for both whole class as well as for small group interventions.
I found these assessments to be extremely useful as well as clearly described.  The assessment process can take a lot of time, but it really gives the teacher a good idea of where the student is with their literacy growth.  Having the chance to work with the student one on one and witnessing their reading behaviors can be a useful tool in finding the next logical step for improvement.
DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is an assessment for students kindergarten through sixth grade.  The assessment is used to measure initial sound fluency (ISF), letter naming fluency (LNF), phoneme segmentation fluency (PSF), nonsense word fluency (NWF), word use fluency (WUF), and oral reading fluency with retelling fluency (ORF).  A student is asked a series of questions according to which skill is to be assessed, and the teacher uses either a palm pilot or ipod touch with the DIBELS program to record student answers and the time in which it took them to answer the questions.  Everything is timed in order to assess the automaticity and fluency within all of these categories.
I really enjoyed trying out this program for future reference.  I liked how student progress was charted throughout their assessed history and how the program gives helpful suggestions when students are lagging behind.  On the other hand, I did not like using the palm pilot because sometimes it would not register when I would tap a response or a button.  It became fairly annoying.  Perhaps using the ipod touch would have been less frustrating.  Even with this snag, I understood the idea behind this assessment and I would use both of these assessments in my own classroom.  I think a classroom shouldn't have one of these assessments without the other only because I feel that DIBELS could assess fluency more quickly and record student history.  This would allow the teacher to do this more often if needed.  The QRI-5 assesses comprehension and retelling skills in a more in depth manner than the DIBELS.  Both assessments are important to accurately assess student learning and to help guide their literacy learning.

Reading Rockets ELL Webpage

I really enjoyed watching the videos on the website: http://www.readingrockets.org/atoz/english_language_learners .  Several of the videos were focused on the use of standards and how they should be addressed in the classroom and during meetings with fellow colleagues.  I agreed with what the principal was saying about the implementation of state standards in that until one surrounds oneself with the standards and has understood them thoroughly is the only way to successfully address standards.  At this point being a pre-teacher, I understand the standards, what they are, and what they mean, but I haven't yet had the chance to make the standards a fixture in my own classroom.  They are not all familiar to me, but they make sense and I understand how to use them.  While I am not in the classroom, I can take this opportunity to review the standards so they are much easier to reflect on once I begin student teaching.
I also liked hearing about the vertical comparison of the standards between grade levels as a strategy for teachers to become more in sync with benchmarks and expectations.  Kindergarten and first grade teachers compare standards, second and third grade teachers compare standards, etc.  Then the upper elementary school teachers discuss with the lower elementary school teachers points that they feel should be addressed that could help their students before they reach upper elementary school.  These could be certain comprehension strategies, organization strategies, an emphasis on common sense, or a wide variety of other things.
One of the video mentioned the Daily Language Review, when each day, the students are presented with a grammatically incorrect sentence and they are to fix the sentence or to identify what the grammatical issue is with the sentence.  The teacher mentioned that her ELLs, at the beginning of the year, did not make any corrections because the grammatical error took the form of the way they spoke, therefore, they didn't see the sentence as being incorrect.  By the end of the year, nearly all the students were able to read the sentence aloud and explain what made the sentence grammatically incorrect.  I really like this idea because while students are exploring the new language of English, seeing the structure of English could be a great strategy to students who are more structured or logical thinkers.  If they know the rules or if they understand when something sounds incorrect, the more likely they will correct their own speaking or writing.  I was lucky enough to witness this when my target student read a sentence to me that he had just written, but he realized that he had made a mistake.  He immediately picked up his pen and made the correction.

Comprehension Video Response

This video shared a lot of important information and strategies that should be taught to students in order to help build their comprehension while reading.  I'm glad that Professor Duke described why teaching comprehension strategies becomes very important from third grade through fifth grade, not just the fact that they will be facing expository text, but the fact that the nature of the language becomes more "written" and academic as opposed to "spoken" language that students have been previously exposed.
I also really enjoyed how the teacher had a poster listing a variety of strategies students could use to guide their thinking about text.  Thinking aloud, creating inferences, building predictions, rereading, looking for context clues, breaking down unknown words, are just a few of the strategies that are touched upon in the video.  I like how that these are posted around the room, the teachers consistently model, and guide students through the use of these strategies.  It rang true to me that a teacher should be more of a coach and less of a didactic speaker of information.
I don't think that any of the ideas in this video are new, but I would happily use many if not all of these techniques in teaching my future students how to build their comprehension.  Giving students the opportunities to explore texts through discussion and writing along with explicitly teaching comprehension strategies, teacher modeling of these strategies, and guided use of these strategies.  Students need to know why and how these strategies are used and they need to be given a variety of facets to explore the use of these strategies.
Teaching these comprehension strategies can help all readers, even struggling readers.  All readers need to have a repertoire of methods that they can fall back on in order to understand what they read.  Struggling readers will realize that comprehension is the goal of reading and they will have the tools to lead them to their goal.