Developmentally appropriate assessments of children and evaluation of programs should inform instruction
Effective practice—whether educational or clinical—starts with comprehensive assessment. If we are to prevent reading difficulties, provide timely, successful intervention for those at-risk children, and raise the bar for reading success, ongoing assessment should be commonplace. It should guide our program designs, classroom practices, intervention goals and clinical services, including our midcourse corrections. We recognize that a recommendation about assessments may be construed as problematic or inappropriate. There are legitimate reasons why assessing preschool children has been an unpopular idea. When assessment systems result in high-stress experiences for our children or purposeless additions to professionals’ plates, we can all be concerned. However, by neglecting to regularly evaluate our young children’s language and early reading skills, we have done more harm than good. We need to put our efforts into selecting multiple measures and interpreting their results in appropriate ways to promote student success. It is how assessments are used—and with whom and how the results are interpreted and used—that can be positive or negative, accurate or inaccurate. When used in accurate and ethical ways, assessments can be the critical difference between a child receiving the help he needs or struggling in reading.

Lansdowne had minimal formal training in choosing and interpreting reading and language assessments. She was not aware that, in addition to the data from tests used at Rosa Parks, her teachers would need test data that would compare her students with students at same grade levels across the state and the nation. Without this comparable information, it was difficult for teachers to recognize that while students were, indeed, improving in reading, they were not meeting benchmarks. Mary and her teachers didn’t realize that the vocabulary and reading instruction at Rosa Parks wasn’t targeted or rigorous enough to help their children reach the level of their Massachusetts peers.

*Representative of schools/students the research team has studied.