A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests: Knowledge is Power

By Kate MontgomeryLucy McCormick CalkinsBeverly Falk, et al.

In recent years, the increasingly high stakes attached to norm-referenced reading tests have made it harder to hold onto what we believe about language arts education. Now, Lucy Calkins, Kate Montgomery, and Donna Santman meet us in the true trenches, offering companionship and guidance in the most lonely, complex, and sometimes heartbreaking area of our teaching: preparing students for standardized reading tests.

Written with the intimacy, inspiration, and classroom-based practicality we've come to expect from The Art of Teaching Writing, A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests reflects the authors' belief that in order to be less victimized by tests, we need to be more knowledgeable about them. To that end, their book: provides a complete overview of tests, showing us how to use this information to be more powerful and more articulate participants in today's political conversations and in our interactions with colleagues, parents, and our students demonstrates how the methods we've come to trust in the reading and writing workshop can be built upon and adapted as we do test-preparation work with our students rethinks the reading workshop in light of standardized tests, describing predictable challenges children will face when taking tests and ways we can help children develop the capabilities to meet those challenges provides guidelines for reading and interpreting test results, enabling us to minimize the damage caused by troubling scores. "If our students do well on tests," write the authors, "we are in a far stronger position to be critical of those same tests." With A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests, educators can achieve these results, and advocate for and use forms of assessment that inform teaching and support student learning.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 032500000X
• ISBN13: 9780325000008
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
• Length: 199 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.0" x 9.4"
• Grade Range: Kindergarten to Grade 5

Customer Reviews

Ambivalent

Lucy Calkins is generally a good writer with her heart and skills in the right place. This book is solid and helpful. I'm glad the professor in question assigned it, because it has helped...I'm sorry though that there is so much emphasis on evaluative testing that the need for this book will keep it and related volumes in print for the next 2,000,000 years. I just finished my second advanced degree (in Education) and I've found this little tome to be useful. My suggestion: repeal NCLB and let the teachers (who are, after all, the experts about teaching) be in charge of curriculum again and to heck with mandated assessments. Still, as long as there are those kinds of tests, this is the book to have.

A Teacher's Guide to Standardized Reading Tests : Knowledge

Standardized testing got you down? Here is a fresh way to approach the task of test prep. Using 'Strategy' work (as taught in Strategies That Work, and Mosaic of Thought) and investigative work into what students are thinking, Ms. Calkin treats 'test taking' as a genre. I used her approach this year, and found it flowed seamlessly into our Reader's Workshop 'Strategy' investigations.

Certainly makes you think!

As a reading teacher,this book has done wonders to help me see where we are weak in preparing our students for taking standardized tests. It is written as a case study and is easy reading. Super ideas for helping your students understand what is expected of them and how to prepare them.