Tools, Measures & Approaches

Building an accurate profile of students' learning - tools, measures and approaches...

Describe the tools/measures/approaches you plan to use to get a more detailed and accurate profile of students’ learning in relation to that challenge. Justify why you chose these approaches and tools.

Kahui Ako Achievement Challenge 5: Increase the achievement of Years 7-10, in reading, writing and maths, as measured against National Standards and agreed targets.

My inquiry problem/ challenge: Year 7 and 8 students who are 'stuck' at the reading ages of 8-9 years old.  Some of the problems I've been faced with already are the types of reading material available for this reading age, but not suitable or interesting enough for this age group (11, 12, 13 year olds).

To measure how much 'new knowledge' or reading strategies students are learning or picking up, I plan to use the following tools and approaches:

PAT/STAR/e-asTTle/ARBs/Running records:

I plan to analyse the PAT closely and group the types of questions students struggled on. STAR is a great indicator of sentence structures and vocabulary acquisition and meaning. This can be done 1-1 with students who have completed the STAR test. Filling the gaps is a great task to work out sense making, if learners even know what a grammatically correct sentence sounds like.

Use of e-asttle mini tests and ARBs will also be beneficial for testing out specific reading strategies/comprehension skilss taught in short weeks. This can be done as a before and after mini test. 

Running Records can be of use when you are wanting to take note of particular reading behaviours. These are very useful using the PM readers up to Level 30.

Student Voice:

This has been very useful and informative in my past inquiries as sometimes the way you think the lesson went doesn't always match up with how students feel. Gaining student voice before, during and after an intervention in a great way to gauge whether something is working, and students are interested in what they are learning.

Plan/Reflect Weekly: 

This is very important to carry out as well as monitor. Plan on how I will go about the intervention, then reflect each week on whether it needs changing or if it on the right track. Completing reflections straight after a reading lesson can sometimes be difficult so jotting down notes to self on the modelling sheets or on the board with student initials as students are learning will be great in helping to gather evidence at reflection time.