What is the Reading Aptitude Continuum?
As
I present around the country about reading, I am often asked, “What do you use
and is there a more purposeful assessment available?” To answer that question,
it is important to understand that reading occurs on a continuum and that at
times, our biggest enemy is our belief that assessments that are grade
specific, as opposed to skill specific can help us determine what our students
need. The assessments that I have created are based upon skills, not grade
level. They can be utilized with any student in the process of learning to
decode for reading. This can be a child that happens to be at the Pre-K level,
a struggling intermediate reader, an ESL student, a student with disabilities
or any other student in the process of learning to read.
As teachers, each of us needs to
determine what is a student’s skill level, what needs to be taught and what
skills comes next. The purpose of the Reading Aptitude Continuum is to provide
teachers with a framework that allows you to see skills in a progression that
will aide your students in becoming successful readers. Every time we test
a skill and find the student unsuccessful, we have to look to the prior skills
and then determine what to teach. When the student has successfully mastered
the skill, we then move to the next skill assessment. Targeted assessments
should drive our instruction.
Foundation skills embedded with fluency and comprehension strategies can
lead to creating successful readers.
What is ESGI?
ESGI,
Educational Software for Guiding Instruction, is a simple, online assessment
platform for conducting one-on-one assessments.
I partnered with ESGI because it is ideal for testing non-readers, emergent
readers and struggling readers. You can choose from hundreds of pre-loaded
tests—including my Reading Aptitude Continuum tests—or create your own. After
assessing students with the yes/no format, choose from charts, graphs and
reports to guide instruction. ESGI eliminates the paper, saving you hours on
assessments and providing you hours for instruction.
How does ESGI help to effectively use the Reading Aptitude Continuum?
The Reading Aptitude Continuum provides
a series of tests that are thorough, tested and reliable. With ESGI, teachers
can give one-on-one assessments, instantly visualize student performance,
analyze areas of weakness or growth, and quickly target instruction. With an ESGI subscription, a teacher has
access to all 112 of the tests in the Reading Aptitude Continuum.
Once the assessments are given, the teachers can target their instruction based
on the data in the Pie Charts, Bar Graphs Analysis, Class Totals Report, and
Test History. Teachers can also print customized parent report letters as well
has flash cards to support the reading instruction.
How do I get started?
Each ladder in the continuum contains
rungs that build decoding skills. While it is certainly possible for a
student to miss a couple of rungs and continue to climb the ladder, you
wouldn’t want a student to have no footings in a ladder. Pick and choose the assessments most valuable
to your class or individual students in identifying needs. Your first step will be to determine where to
start in your assessments. Based upon
your work with the student, look at the ladder and determine where you believe
he/she should start. If the assessments
are too hard, stop and go back several tests.
If they are too easy, jump forward a few. Keep in mind, that for the most part, the
assessments were created to be easiest at the start of each assessment and to
end with hardest level of the skill.
This will allow you to determine if a high level of mastery is
evident. It’s important to remember
that many skills have a quick assessment and that if there is any sense that
the student hasn’t truly mastered the skill, you may want to add to the number
of questions.
Each of the 7 ladders in the continuum contains rungs that build decoding
skills. Pick and choose the assessments most valuable to your class or
individual students in identifying needs. Each concept has directions on the
sheet, along with the questions, words, letters or phrases listed. Each list
then has a corresponding sheet or sheets of the cards that can be used for the
assessments. (The exception is the Phonemic Awareness section as all of the
concepts are done orally and require no cards) Assessment Recording Sheets are
included. There is an individual student recording sheet and a class recording
sheet. Each sheet has skills broken up by ladder or concept. Every sheet is customizable and can be modified for
the skills you are assessing.
The
Entire Reading Aptitude Continuum is also available on a thumb drive for
purchase here. The thumb drive contains the reading ladders,
instructions, printable flash cards, and score sheets, as well as customizable
versions of the cards and score sheets. Or Try
ESGI FREE for 60 days! Sign up with promo code thesmartiezone to save $40 off your new
user subscription. After entering your students, go to the Test Explorer to
locate all of Donna Whyte’s Reading Aptitude tests. You can see the list of 112
tests here. An introduction, lists of all included skills
and the reading ladders are available to ESGI teachers here.
