RES 5530: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (Spring 2009)

In my first week of teaching, I began assessing students and planning reading groups for reading instruction. On Thursday, after I had completed IRIs with most of my students, I began to explain what our reading groups would entail for the year. One of the children in my class said, "It's okay. We usually read out of the textbook. We're in the low class." Not knowing how to respond, I simply said, "Well, we are going to try some new things in reading class this 6 weeks and see how they work out." I was completely devastated. The classes are ability-grouped for reading at my school. However, the students are not told of their abilities or why they are in the class that they are. This is when I learned that students can easily make inferences about their placements and their ranking among their peers.

"The central prerequisite for advancing the teaching of reading is to grasp the process of learning to read through the nonreader's eyes and ears - we must understand what it is like not be able to read." --Hinchman

This quote from Hinchman resonated strongly with me. After reading it once, I returned to read it once more for a better meaning in the way a beginning reader would. We must understand what it is like not to be able to read. I think this is a tough idea for most teachers. Because we are teachers and studying at the masters level, it would probably be a safe guess that most of us were natural readers or possibly teachable readers. For the most part, we did not struggle to the point of frustration year after year. I believe that to really understand children and the type of instruction they need, we should talk to them and gather information about how it feels to struggle with different aspects of reading instruction. It is easier to find out exactly what my students want or need if I ask them. Assessment scores can give a lot of data; however, they cannot provide why the student failed or how they felt about the assessment task.

The next piece of this article I would like to address was the topic of quantitative versus qualitative assessment. Quantitative assessment can provide numbers and percentages of correct problems; however, it does not assess the types of mistakes the student made. An example of the importance of analyzing the type of mistake students make took place in my own classroom this year. On a spelling assessment, two students made Fs, both in the 60s. This would suggest that they are near the same level in spelling instruction. However, student #1 spelled bench B-A-N-C-H. Student #2 spelling bench B-A-C-H-T. A qualitative analysis would suggest that the first student was actually higher than the second. The substitution of A for E is a common short-vowel substitution. The student also recognized initial consonant, a nasal, and a final digraph. The student was pretty successful in spelling the word. However, the second student only mastered initial consonant. This is one example of a time when quantitative analysis is not enough. The quality of the mistakes made a world of difference for these two students and the type of instruction they required.

Finally, I also enjoyed the talk of investigating social issues through children's literature in the second reading. I think incorporating history and social issues in literature is a superb way to engage students and interest them in reading instruction. In my last internship while at ASU, I did a literature study with 6th graders and the novel Number the Stars. I quickly learned that although some struggled with the tough concepts in the book, they really enjoyed the history and social issues because it was a part of a story that they were able to read. Students were interested in continuing reading the book and learning more in social studies about WWII and the Holocaust because of the integration of the material into their reading instruction. I think this can be very effective when students are given the opportunity to express their opinions and feelings in a structured open environment, like a classroom.

Brittany Guy