Chapter Nine

Background

• Today, we view assessment of student performance in the classroom through a very different lens. The goal is that all students, including MLs, will meet rigorous standards, learn academic language and content, and be successful as is possible on assessments of learning.
• Keep in mind that there is no intended hierarchy in the order of SIOP components. You should be reviewing and assessing throughout learning processes.
• Just as students need to know what the objectives are for a lesson, they also need to be informed about how they will be assessed on them.
• There is a difference between assessment and evaluation. Assessment is the gathering and synthesizing of information concerning student learning, evaluation is making judgments about students’ learning based on assessment results

Informal Assessment

• Formative assessments tends to be informational
• They should be:
• Authentic
• Such as portfolios, performance based projects, anything in a real life context
• Multidimensional
• Teachers should use different ways of determining student performance, reading, writing, speaking, listening
• Multiple Indicators
• You should have more than one piece of evidence indicative of progress toward mastery of lesson objectives

Formal Assessment

• Formal assessments can be formative (to achieve a baseline) or summative
• Many, but not all MLs are at a disadvantage when taking any assessment that presumes the test taker is English proficient. Provide scaffolding such as sentence frames, visuals and word banks just like you did with the practices.
• SIOP teachers should explicitly teach, model, and provide practice with the general academic words and terms that are described in chapter three.
• *Coaches note-this would be an excellent homeroom activity*
• Be certain that when MLs are learning content, that is what you are assessing, their knowledge and understanding of the content, not how well they know English.

SIOP Feature 27: Comprehensive Review of Key Vocabulary

• An important aspect of ensuring students’ retention of key vocabulary is providing a comprehensive vocabulary review at the end of each lesson
• Research findings are clear-isolated word lists and dictionary definitions alone do not promote vocab and language development. Rather, provide as many exposures as possible to new, important words, terms, and phrases through meaningful tasks that incorporate multiple modalities.

SIOP Feature 28: Comprehensive Review of Key Content Concepts

• It is essential that MLs have key content concepts reviewed at the same time.
• There are specific examples of how to do that on page 241

SIOP Feature 29: Regular Feedback Provided to Students on Their Output

• Periodic review of language, vocabulary and content enables teachers to provide feedback to students. Effective feedback for MLs:
• Supports and validates
• Perhaps the most important way to provide feedback is through being supportive
• Is specific and academically oriented
• MLs and students who struggle need very specific academic feedback, usually in private. They need to know exactly what they did that’s right so they can do it again and/or build upon it.
• You don’t need to go into extreme detail. It might be as simple as “Good use of uppercase letters!”
• Just remember to be specific about what you have observed and communicate it directly to the student(s) involved.
• Is appropriate to students’ language proficiency levels
• Teacher feedback focuses on the academic content and language that being taught via the content and language objectives

SIOP Feature 29: Regular Feedback Provided to Students on Their Output

• Continued..
• Focuses on both content and language
• Continue to provide temporary scaffolds, especially to the intermediate students who tend to plateau
• Includes modeling
• Things like restating a sentence with correct form while validating provides feedback that is instructive and helpful
• Includes paraphrasing
• Questioning strategies would be particularly helpful here. Things like, “tell me more about that?” and “what I’m hearing is…”
• Includes facial expressions and body language
• A nod, smile of support, or encouraging look can help you make a safe space for your students
• Can be provided by students for each other
• Set students up for support for peer to peer conversations by using sentence frames or talk moves

SIOP Feature 30: Assessment of Student Comprehension and Learning of All Lesson Objectives Throughout Lesson

• For MLs, assessment adaptations must be made if teachers are to ascertain accurately the extent to which lesson objectives and standards are met
• You should orally review with your students the posted content and language objectives of each lesson
• They also should have an opportunity to self reflect with where they are at on those objectives, ideally as an exit ticket at the end of the day

Application to Your Classroom: Review & Assessment

• Review and assessment can be accomplished with individual, partner, small group or whole class activities. More details on these activities can be found on page 245.
• Jeopardy Labs
• 75 Digital Tools & Apps to Support Formative Assessment in the Classroom
• Vocabulary or Word Study Journals
• Rubrics
• Group Response Techniques (more ideas than just thumbs up/down)
• Batter Up!
• Engaging review activity

Differentiating for Multilevel Classes

• What follows are ways that you can differentiate formative and summative assessment for students with varied levels of English. Read more about these on page 249.
• Adapt the number of items an ML is expected to complete
• Adapt the amount of time an ML has for completing a task
• Adap the amount of scaffolding
• Adap the skill level, type of problem or task
• Adapt the type of response
• Adapt the degree of active involvement
• Adapt the procedures used in each lesson

The book features a few different teachers teaching 8th grade world history and their various approaches. I recommend reading these pages for yourself.

There are “teaching scenarios” on pages 250-259

Summary

• Review & assessment are integrated processes, essential for all students, but they are critical to the success of MLs.
• Informal assessment is attentive to the classroom context, is authentic and multidimensional, and includes multiple indicators of student’s performance.
• Effective SIOP teachers carefully plan for review and informal assessment of key vocab throughout a lesson and at its conclusion
• Formal assessments (ACT/SAT/WIDA) require that students understand and apply content knowledge on tests that have high stakes. Therefore it it's important to teach, review, and assess MLs learners understandings of the cross curricular process/ function words and terms that are often found in test questions
• At the conclusion of a SIOP lesson, teachers assess the degree to which students have met all content and language objectives
• More importantly, review and assessment guide teaching and reteaching, inform decision making, lead to supportive and academic feedback, and provide for fair and comprehensive judgements about student performance.