Assessment: Public vs Private

Professor Max Coltheart, President, Learning Difficulties Australia

Assessment is a dirty word for some, especially for teachers, principals and education unions worrying about league tables. Their worry is that if student abilities are compulsorily assessed in every school and the results made public, such publicly-available tables would, in the words of Mr Angelo Gavrielatos, federal president of the Australian Education Union, “increase inequality as parents deserted schools that were seen as low-quality and high-scoring schools took only the best-performing students” (quoted in The Age, March 23).

This is an understandable worry. But it should not be a worry about the practice of assessment in schools; it is only a worry about the results of such assessments being made publicly available. Wouldn’t we hope that every teacher who is teaching a class of children to read would care about which children in the class are progressing well in learning to read and which ones are struggling? If so, how can teachers be sure about this except by objectively assessing each child’s level of reading ability? I say ‘objectively’ because subjective impressions here can be very misleading. It is easy to notice the poor progress of the hyperactive child given to zooming around the classroom; a lot harder to notice that the quiet child sitting up the back and not causing any problems still can’t read at all.

And yet appropriate assessment of basic reading abilities in children who are in the first year or two of learning to read is quick, easy and requires very little training. All it really requires is an appreciation that reading is not a single skill, but a collection of  kills, each requiring separate assessment.

Take ‘sounding out’ using letter-sound rules, for example. We know that how well young children can sound out a word that they have never seen before is a strong predictor of how well they will progress in learning to read, and we know why. Seven-year-old children will have at least 10,000 words that they can recognise by ear, but only a few hundred or fewer that they can recognise by eye from the printed page. So they will constantly come across words on the page that they would recognise if only they could hear them. The ability to sound out neverbefore-seen words allows them to use their large auditory vocabularies as a way of working out what word this is that they are looking at. That way they can learn to recognise the word next time they see it in print. So a child who hasn’t learned how to sound out will struggle to learn to read. That means it is crucial to assess sounding-out ability frequently. How? By giving children a task that can only be accomplished by sounding out, and the only such task is reading aloud nonsense words such as ‘ree’ or ‘byrcal’. There are standardised tests of reading that include nonsenseword reading subtests, but even if teachers made up their own nonsense words and got children to read these aloud, they would find the children in their class who did not know how to sound out.

Sounding out is critical as an aid to learning to read but children must eventually move on from using it to recognise printed words to a subsequent stage where they can recognise printed words quickly and directly without needing to sound them out. How can one assess how well a child can do this? By giving children a task that cannot be accomplished by sounding out, and can only be done by immediate visual recognition of words. This task is reading aloud words that disobey the sounding-out rules, exception words like ‘yacht’ and ‘have’. A child who can correctly read such words aloud is not doing this by sounding out by lettersound rules, because this would get the word wrong. Only recognising the word as a familiar whole will allow correct response. So this is the method for assessing how good the child’s visual word recognition is.

Finally there is comprehension. There are many standardised tests that teachers can use if they are willing to assess the reading of the children they are teaching, so I needn’t mention these. Instead, I will describe the TERC (Test of Everyday Reading Comprehension) being developed at Macquarie University by Genevieve McArthur, Anne Castles and Linda Larsen. Their idea is to think up examples in the everyday life of children of situations where they need to be able to understand text, and then to test whether the child succeeds in comprehension. In this example, for instance, the child is shown the picture of the text message on the mobile phone and asked a question like: “Where will the mother’s car be after swimming?”

Other examples in the TERC include understanding printed bus timetables, understanding instructions on medicine bottles, working out where to go from a birthday card, instructions for making instant noodles, and so on.

A nice thing about this test is that if a child does badly on it, it is easy to convey the problem to parents. Instead of saying, “Your child has a Reading Comprehension Age of 7 years and 5 months”, you can say to the parent, “Your child wasn’t able to work out when the pills should be taken when reading this instruction from the medicine bottle”.

But it isn’t easy to think up suitable examples. Here we appeal to LDA members for help. Can you think of some examples of everyday situations that children aged between eight and 12 come across where they are confronted with the task of needing to understand simple text, like the examples I have given above? Please send these to me and I will pass them on to Genevieve, Anne and Linda so that they can expand the scope of the TERC. This test is going to be made publicly available, and we hope that it will eventually be used by classroom teachers to assess the progress in everyday reading comprehension of the children they are teaching to read.