LEARN NC

people reading on benches

Ongoing assessment for reading

By Jeanne Gunther

1.3 Text selection

Finding the instructional level

Texts selected for running records should challenge a student sufficiently that he or she makes some errors for the student to analyze, but not enough that he or she becomes frustrated. This level is called the instructional level. Each student has three levels of texts for reading:

  • Instructional. A student’s reading level is determined to be instructional when an accuracy rate (as explained in the section on quantitative analysis) is between 90 and 94 percent. This is a text that the child can use to learn to extend cuing systems with guidance from the teacher.
  • Independent. A student’s independent (sometimes labeled easy) reading level corresponds to an accuracy rate is over 94 percent. This is a text the student is able to read by him or herself without teacher support.
  • Frustration. A child’s frustration (sometimes labeled hard) reading level is determined when a student’s accuracy rate is below 90 percent.

The determination of these levels is a bit flexible, though, as a teacher may use information such as the types of errors made, previous reading behaviors, and comprehension questions to make a decision about instructional level.

Identifying suitable texts

Texts already made available to students by their approximate reading levels are the texts appropriate for assessment. If a child has selected the text, he or she clearly has an interest in reading it. If the teacher selects the text for the child, it should be done in a manner that reflects not only the child’s reading level but also his or her interests. The assessment is then more valuable because the child approaches it with authentic motivation: The student is not merely reading a random text but is engaged in a book that he or she can continue to explore independently after the assessment has been completed.

Most classrooms have books already leveled for young readers. Books may be categorized by Reading Recovery level or Guided Reading level. Some teachers use a mix of these levels, working easily between them and knowing the approximate equivalents between systems. Students are usually guided to read from a certain selection of books that provide them with a range of both genre and readability.

Gay Su Pinnell and Irene C. Fountas have written an extremely helpful volume that identifis books by their Guided Reading level: The Fountas & Pinnell Leveled Book List, K–8, 2006–2008 Edition (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 2005).

Selecting texts for the youngest readers

Preschoolers, kindergarteners, and first graders are experiencing reading readiness, or emergent reading. (Of course these grade levels are an estimation, as development does not always occur on a definite timeline.) These are the skills and dispositions of a reader that are developing as the child listens to stories read aloud. An emerging reader will make heavy use of the pictures as meaning cues and will need texts which have exaggerated spaces between the words as he or she learns to track the print. Emerging readers may track print with a finger, pointing to each word as it is read, or with their eyes only. These are reading behaviors to note and to take into consideration when selecting texts. Although an abundance of supportive pictures and definitive spacing are helpful for emergent readers, it does not mean that emergent-level texts will always contain these features.