Assessment tasks in a new reading course for teacher education

As with every tertiary field, assessment plays a major role in what initial teacher education (ITE) students learn in their teacher training. As part of my design of a new reading-focused course at the University of Queensland (UQ), which I introduced here, I’m thinking about the best ways of designing assessment tasks that will prepare ITE students for the realities of primary school reading instruction. In this post, I’ll outline important considerations when designing assessment tasks for tertiary contexts, my preliminary assessment ideas for the new reading course, and some things I’m still wondering about, which you might like to weigh in on.

Designing assessment tasks for a new reading course

First, here are six points I consider important when thinking about assessment task design in tertiary contexts:

1. Assessment tasks should accurately and reliably assess ITE students understandings and skills;

2. Assessment tasks should be practically useful for ITE students;

3. Assessment tasks should replicate the sorts of practices of effective classroom teachers;

4. Assessment tasks should include opportunities for planning for, teaching, assessing, and reflecting on student outcomes in that area (e.g., reading in this case);

5. Assessment tasks related to reading instruction should assess ITE students' knowledge and skills of all essential elements of reading - not just phonics and comprehension;

6. Assessment task expectations should be clearly communicated to ITE students through weekly lectures and tutorials and assessment-specific supports such as task walkthroughs or video conferences.

If assessment tasks are accurate and reliable, practically useful, similar to the practices of effective classroom teachers, focused on the core aspects of teaching and learning, based on all essential elements of reading, and clearly communicated, they should be well-received by ITE students as worthy of considerable time and effort.

Most university courses run for 13 weeks. While some courses may only have two assignments, it’s now common practice for course designers to include an early, low-stakes assignment. This means courses usually have three or four assignments in total. At UQ, lecturers are not allowed to include more than four assignments in a course, though we can have assignments that include multiple components.

I think it’s safe to say that marking assignments is not the most enjoyed aspect of teaching for educators in many contexts. While teacher educators don’t teach nearly as often as classroom teachers, they commonly mark assignments from upwards of 100 or more ITE students every semester. With courses usually including three or four assignments, and with these often being written tasks with 1,000 to 2,000 words per assignment, marking can become a major part of a lecturer’s job in no time.

Preliminary assessment schedule for the new reading course

With this context out of the way, here’s my thinking so far for assessment in the reading course. For students to demonstrate their understandings of all essential elements of reading, I have to assess them more than four times (something I’m not allowed to do if these are standalone assignments). To get around this issue, the ITE students will complete six smaller tasks that will combine to become a reading instruction resource portfolio (i.e., Assessment Task 1). Then, they will design two early and upper primary reading lesson and assessment plans (i.e., Assessment Task 2). I’ve explained my thinking for these tasks below.

Assessment Task 1: Reading instruction resource portfolio

I’d like the ITE students to spend the semester creating a portfolio of reading learning experiences and resources they’ll be able to use on their placements. If they see these portfolio resources as useful, I’m hoping the students will continue reflecting on and adding to these once they start teaching a class of their own.

The portfolio will include a shorter task for each essential element of reading (i.e., phonological awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency, plus oral language). These tasks will require ITE students to engage in a variety of practical activities, such as using the IPA to identify phonemes and graphemes in words and sentences, assessing elements of reading as they listen to children reading, critiquing and improving examples of problematic reading instruction, interpreting and making decisions based on reading data, and creating reading teaching resources.

Assessment Task 2: Early and upper primary reading lesson and assessment plans

The second assignment would involve ITE students planning two standalone lessons, with one focused on early primary and the other on upper primary. Students could base these lessons on any two of the essential elements of reading. They would be required to complement their lesson plans with assessment plans, detailing how they would integrate assessment opportunities into their learning experiences, and a theoretical rationale, justifying their choices.

These lessons would be designed with reference to key concepts underpinning the course, such as Rosenshine’s principles of explicit instruction (2012), the gradual release of responsibility model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983), and the Response to Intervention approach (e.g., Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006) to explicitly support student learning about phonics and comprehension. ITE students would be expected to include learning intentions and success criteria in child-friendly language and examples of teacher talk, think-alouds, and modelling with one or several mentor texts. Their lesson plans would be written in the genre of procedural texts that could be picked up and used by other teachers if needed.

The ITE students’ lessons would be based on developmentally appropriate elements of reading. For instance, I’d expect them to plan phonological awareness or phonics lessons for early primary but not for upper primary, since the majority of school students will have mastered the decoding side of the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) by upper primary school if teachers focus on approaches like systematic synthetic phonics in the early primary years. I’m excited to assess upper primary lesson plans on traditionally underrepresented elements of reading, such as fluency and vocabulary.

As a side note, I would love to integrate practical videos from actual teachers in actual classrooms for each essential element of reading throughout the course. ITE students often want to know about how to set up the classroom for literacy blocks, how to assess on the fly in busy classroom environments, and what reading programs and resources are most useful for different aspects of reading (and how long should be spent teaching different aspects of reading each day). These kinds of questions are best answered by expert, practising teachers. It would be excellent to have a short practical video to complement the lecture and tutorial content each week (such as this wonderful example of phonics instruction from Saint Augustine’s primary school originally shared by AITSL that I’m sure many of you would have seen). Imagine having something like this on fluency, and vocabulary, and phonological awareness, and so on!

It’s been extremely helpful to write about this process and receive ideas and support from many in the education community. I’ll shift back to translating key literacy research for my next post, but if you have any suggestions for how designing assessment tasks in a new reading course could drive ITE student engagement, and give them opportunities to practise key practices of reading teachers, it would be great to hear them.

References

Fuchs, D., & Fuchs, L. S. (2006). Introduction to Response to Intervention: What, why, and how valid is it? Reading Research Quarterly, 41(1), 93–99. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.41.1.4

Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104

Pearson, P. D., & Gallagher, M. C. (1983). The instruction of reading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8, 317-344

Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, Spring 2012, 12-39. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Rosenshine.pdf