Functional Assessment for Language and Literacy
Functional Assessment for Language and Literacy - Design a Compelling Intervention Plan
A functional literacy and language assessment creates a clear picture of your students' learning profiles, what the barriers to progress are and what needs to be done next.
In short, functional assessments are a key to understanding what your students may do well in respect to language and literacy, and, importantly, what they struggle with.
Standardized tests by design can only really tell part of the story. To truly support our students' literacy and learning, we need to understand how students understand and use language where it matters most: in the classroom while accessing the curriculum.
Functional assessments shine a light on your students' most pressing challenges and create meaningful opportunities for targeted intervention.
In a recent publication, Professor Geraldine Wallach outlines 5 principles of assessment for speech-language pathologists to follow:
- Understand the difference between identifying a student for services and creating and implementing an intervention program.
- Avoid the teach-to-the-test trap.
- Observe language abilities under different situations that mey stress the system.
- Collect spoken and written samples.
- Observe in the contexts in which students must survive and thrive.
Wallach makes the point that effective school-age language assessment requires a clear distinction between identifying a student for services and designing and implementing an intervention.
Standardized assessments play a key role in eligibility decisions, but t are quite limited in scope. They fail to reflect the complexities of language use in an academic sense and the impact that has on student life.
In that spirit we need to go beyond mere test scores and instead detail how a student uses language in the real-world of a classroom environment.
Functional, dynamic and curriculum-based assessments, observations, added with oral and written language samples are essential keys to understand a student's strengths and needs in real life contexts.
In addition, a direct and compelling intervention plan that is tailored, context-driven, and aligned with classroom expectations implemented with fidelity has a chance for real world success.
Such a plan focuses on actively and purposely building a student's language skills that efficiently support learning across all subject areas.
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