Laurie Elish-Piper, dean of the College of Education, is celebrating the recent publication of “Reading Assessment to Promote Equitable Learning: An Empowering Approach for Grades K-5.”
Published by Guilford Press, the book acknowledges that many standard reading assessment approaches fail to capture the strengths and needs of students from diverse sociocultural, linguistic and academic backgrounds.
Elish-Piper and co-authors Mona W. Matthews and Victoria J. Risko guide educators in planning and conducting meaningful, equitable assessments that empower K–5 teachers and students, inform responsive instruction and help to guard against bias.
The book’s holistic view of reading encompasses areas from text comprehension and constrained skills to building trusting relationships and promoting students’ agency. Twenty-eight assessment strategies are explained in step-by-step detail, including helpful implementation examples and 32 reproducible forms that teachers can download and print.
Elish-Piper recently answered questions from the College of Education’s Ed News.
What inspired you to write the book?
My co-authors and I did over a decade of research on the reading experiences of K-5 students, and we found that standardized and prescriptive assessment was a negative force that narrowed the curriculum and made both teachers and students feel invisible in the teaching and learning processes.
We developed a model for how to use formative literacy assessment to make students and teachers visible in the teaching and learning processes. We describe our approach to assessment as humanizing, empowering, and framed by an equity mindset.
How did you and your co-authors develop the 28 assessment strategies?
We identified key reading processes that inform teachers of students’ assets as learners so they can plan and provide relevant, personally meaningful instruction for each of their students.
We built the assessments around four principles.
- Principle One: Reading assessment must occur through an equity mindset.
- Principle Two: Reading assessment must ensure the visibility of teachers and students in the assessment process
- Principle Three: Reading assessment must be embedded in daily instructional and learning activities.
- Principle Four: Reading assessment must account for reading’s complexity.
Some of the areas of assessment in the book are typical such as constrained skills (i.e., phonemic awareness, word identification, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension), but others focus on areas that are generally not assessed but are vital for equitable access to high quality reading instruction such as funds of identity, agency, identifying student strengths and building trusting relationships.
Who should read this book – and why?
This book is designed for K-5 teacher candidates, educators, and literacy leaders who are committed to equity and want to leverage reading assessment to support their teaching and all of their students’ learning.
How would our schools improve if educators embrace your ideas?
My co-authors and I believe the approach to assessment that we present in this book can contribute to two very important and powerful outcomes.
First, in our approach to reading assessment, teachers are foregrounded and made visible as knowledgeable professionals who are instruments of assessment, honoring their expertise and commitment to teaching and supporting all of their students. Second, because students and their assets and needs are made visible through this approach to assessment, teachers can do a better job of helping all of their students make maximum progress as readers.
What did you learn in writing the book?
I learned that collaborating with colleagues who have different areas of expertise and passions can be challenging and slow down progress at times, but ultimately such collaboration produced a much stronger book. I also learned that as a team, we were able to support each other when challenges and other responsibilities threatened to slow our progress.
