Using Skills Iowa's Reports

If you are giving Assessment Center assessments, you should be checking reports.

It's in the reports that you will find the areas in which your students are succeeding and in which they are struggling. Of course, we want to celebrate the successes, and we want to address the areas that cause our students difficulties.

In his address at the Iowa Association of School Boards, Mike Schmoker pointed out an example of a teacher in Flagstaff, AZ who raised student achievement in his building by having his students do three simple things over and over again: read, discuss and write.

We suggest that you print off the reading comprehension assessments you are giving. After consulting the reports to find the critical needs from this assessment, pass the assessment out to your students and use it again. One way to use it is to have your kids read the passage again and then search the passage for the correct answers. They can do this in teams or individually.

Another activity you might try is to break your class down into teams of twos and have them read the passage with a task in mind. For instance, if you see that your students are having difficulty picking out the main idea, you might have your students take the passage apart paragraph by paragraph writing one sentence that contains the idea that is expressed by that paragraph. If they are having trouble making inferences they could choose all of the events that lead up to a conclusion and all of the events that followed the conclusion and writing a paragraph that explains why things ended the way they did. You get the idea. There is no one way to use the passages in conjunction with the reports, but the key is that you use the reports to point you to a way to read, discuss and write.

Your project leader will be happy to come to your school to help you work with the reports, but the key is to look at them and make decisions on what help your students need. Just knowing that they are struggling with inference or main idea will not help your students. Just assessing your students on these concepts will not help either. Checking reports and planning your instruction around them will have an effect on achievement.