Assessment

The first article I read was Readability versus leveling by Edward Fry. This article made several good comparisons between readability and leveling. The main difference I gathered from the article is that leveling procedures include a number of judgment factors such as format, content, length, illustrations, repetition of words, etc. Readability relies mainly on sentence length and vocabulary. I personally think both of these procedures used together would be the best way to find the appropriate reading level for students. I like that leveling is more subjective and cannot be done by a computer like readability. A major factor of leveling that I really like is judgment, and by judgment it means 'are the readers' background and experience appropriate to understand the text?' I think this is a very important question to consider when trying to find an appropriate reading range. The picture below is an example of leveled books.


The second article I read was by Mary Lose about Response to Intervention. I agree that in order to help a child's' literacy achievement they must be identified as needing an intervention at the very first indication of difficulty. It is so important to identify struggling students early so teachers can work individually with them and develop their skills. A quote that really stuck out to me in this article was "evidence supports the notion that children come by different paths to common outcomes in literacy. This means that no one child learns how to read in the same way. Skilled teachers understand that they need to tailor reading and writing instruction to each individual in order to get the must success out of each student.