Jeanie Stouffer

05/02/2018

Print, Pictures and Performance: The Purposes and Types of

Literacy Assessments

The General Purposes for Literacy Assessments

Assessments have been used in America’s public education system to measure

each child’s achievement in academic subjects.1 Millions of American education students
take a summative evaluation at the end of the year, which many states use to help
determine if the students can advance to the next grade level. Literacy assessments can be
performed formatively by giving multiple assessments over the school year, or they can
be summative and only assess a child’s literacy skills at the end of the year.2

An academic subject that is strongly assessed in American public schools is each

child’s reading and writing skills. Assessments that correlate with student’s reading and
writing skills are used to check if students are meeting grade-level standards, and
determine the letter grade they will get in reading and writing.3 It is tremendously
difficult for children to acquire the skills needed to read and write, but they will be using
these skills for the rest of their life, and thus they are essential.

A child’s performance on a literacy assessment is influenced by what they have

learned in the classroom and what they learned from home. Through these environments,
children learn how to improve their literacy skills by watching adults perform these skills,
seeing visual representations of writing, and verbally communicating with their peers and
adults.4

The content on literacy assessments usually has or will be taught to the student in
the classroom. Literacy Assessment results are used for by teachers to improve their
teaching methods, to modify their classroom instruction to meet their student’s needs.5
They see which questions their students did well on, and the ones that most of their
students got wrong. They also see what they should emphasize in future classroom
lessons.6

12
, Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 74.
3
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 78.
4
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 114-115.
5, 6
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 79.
7
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 86.
 Literacy assessments give teachers information on how their students are
progressing academically and where the students are having difficulty.7 The teacher can
also assess the literary knowledge of his/her students through informal observations, by
asking questions during classroom lessons and by watching students engage in daily
activities.8 S/he can see what interests the student, and can find ways to help the student
with further instruction.

As the year goes along, the teacher can assess how students have progressed in
their knowledge of literacy and determine the areas in which the students need
improvement. Literacy assessments evaluate students’ literacy skills, so their teachers
will know each child’s strengths and weaknesses. If a student is really struggling with a
concept or an idea, the teacher can find direct and indirect ways for students to work on
that concept or idea.9

Picture and Name Task

The Picture and Name Task is a formative assessment used to determine how a
student has progressed in describing pictures they drew and spelling out their name. It
assesses how well children acclimate to choosing what they were able to draw, being able
to talk about what the child draw, and making sure that the child could write out their first
name. I gave this assessment to a young boy named Tommy, and I asked him to draw a
picture and write his name with a Ticonderoga pencil (he chose what he drew) on a piece
of blank paper.

This assessment is beneficial when the child is not limited by time. It takes a
while for young children to decide what they will draw. When I told Tommy he could
draw whatever he wanted on the piece of paper, he kept asking me what he had to draw.
Tommy spent the majority of the assessment figuring out what he was going to draw on
the piece of paper. Young children do a lot of assessments with structure, and this
assessment can be a big shock to them, because they are not given much directions.
Tommy spent a long period of time deciding what he was going to draw, and by
observing him, I was not able to predict when he was going to finish his drawing.

When I asked Tommy to describe his drawing, he told me that he had drawn a
rocket that was going to the moon. He told me that his rocket was green, even though he
drew the rocket with a Ticonderoga pencil. (See Figure 1) After Tommy had drawn the
picture of a rocket, I had asked him to write out his name for me; I wanted to assess how
well he was able to write his first name. I also wanted to see how much knowledge
Tommy had in relation to written alphabetic letters. (See Figure 2)

Figure 1

8
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 75.
9
Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 86.
 Figure 2

While I was performing this assessment, I found that this is a very authentic
assessment, because students have to make decisions and work to the best of their ability
without being guided by an adult. It was very challenging to facilitate at times because
Tommy would ask me questions on how to write letters of his name and I saw him
getting frustrated because he was not confident in writing his first name by himself.
 If I were Tommy’s general education teacher, I would assess his picture by
analyzing the picture he drew and reviewing my notes on what Tommy said about the
rocket. I would then compare the work samples in the Picture and Name Task with other
work samples that Tommy had completed in class throughout the school year, and type a
reflection that said how his literacy skills had progressed throughout the school year.

Concepts about Print

Concepts about Print is a formative assessment to see how well a student has
progressed in their reading abilities throughout the school year. The facilitator reads a
book aloud that is on the student’s grade level and pauses during the reading to ask the
student questions about the reading.10 He or she asks the student specific questions
related to the book, which includes book-orientation concepts, directionality concepts,
and letter and word concepts.11

I facilitated the Concepts about Print assessment on Tommy by asking him

questions about a book called The Great Enormous Hamburger (See Figure 3). This
book is a B level book that goes through a group of children making a large hamburger.
Tommy had some challenges with this book, because all of the illustrations in the book
were hamburgers (See Figure 4). He was unable to distinguish two different images of
hamburgers in the book, as they all appeared the same to him. The general images on
each page looked similar, but each hamburger had different toppings on it. All of the
hamburger pictures appeared the same to Tommy, which made it more difficult for him
when he was asked questions on the images of the book.

Figure 3

10 11
, Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A Balanced Approach (Hoboken: Pearson, 2017), 74.
 Figure 4

Before I would read each page of the book, I asked him twelve questions about
different parts of the book. The questions were given to me by my professor, who had
typed out the questions that I needed to ask Tommy. This gave me structure and
predictability when I facilitated this assessment, because there were specific instructions
given to me before I facilitated it. Unlike The Picture and Name Task, I was not
concerned about Tommy taking too much time on the assessment. If Tommy answered a
question correctly, I would put a check mark next to it. If he got a question wrong, I
would write down what Tommy had said.

When I looked over the piece of paper with the written questions, I found it very
difficult to figure out why Tommy got some of these questions wrong. I did not require
Tommy to explain his answers for these questions, because this was not required by the
directions. For example, when I asked Tommy where the title of the book was located (it
was located on top of the page and said The Great Enormous Hamburger), he just said
“cheeseburger.” I did not have any contextual information on why Tommy had said
cheeseburger and where he had learned about them. If I do an assessment similar to the
Concepts of Print in the future, I will ask additional questions to the student in order to
better understand their reasoning.