Using assessment to improve the teaching of reading

1. Using assessment to improve the teaching of reading David Carroll and Keith Prenton 18 September 2013

2. USAID/GoK Basic Education Program • The Basic Education Program (BEP) is a five-year initiative designed to benefit all public primary and lower secondary schools in Kosovo, (serving grades 1 – 9). It began on 1 October 2010 and is scheduled to end on 30 September 2015. • BEP’s motto is “Developing students’ 21st Century skills with schools and communities”. To this end, BEP seeks to improve the capacity of Kosovo’s schools to provide relevant skills for its students. • BEP’s overarching goal is to improve the Government of Kosovo’s institutional capacity in the education sector and improve the quality of primary education. • BEP is funded by USAID and the Government of Kosovo. FHI 360 is implementing BEP on behalf of USAID in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and Kosovo Education Center (KEC) which manages Component 3 of the Program.

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4. Using Assessment to Improve Student Competencies • Inviting all Kosovo’s primary school teachers to complete a three day, “Assessment for Learning” (AfL) course, which aims to increase the quality of teaching and learning process and enhance the progress of individual students. To date, over 7500 teachers have attended the course. • Assisting the MEST Assessment Division to improve the quality of test items, using PISA models. • Developing an Early Grades Reading Assessment (EGRA) in Albanian language; conducting a baseline study of 800 students using this EGRA; and, based on the findings ,developing a training course and supplementary reading materials for Grade 1 – 5 teachers.

5. Deconstructing the PISA Reading Literacy Framework • Getting from where we are to where we want to be

6. Predicting Kosovo’s 2015 Performance

7. The PISA Reading Literacy Framework • Texts: medium, environment, format, type • Aspects: access and retrieve; integrate and interpret; reflect and evaluate • Situations: personal, public, educational, occupational

8. PISA Proficiency Levels Six levels are defined: • Average percent of students able to perform at the level or above is given • Characteristics of tasks at each level • Examples of released questions at the level, with their scaled difficulty.

9. PISA 2009 – Cumulative % of test takers at or above each level

10. Level 3 – the Median OECD Test Taker

11. Comparing Level 2 and Level 3

12. What to do? Two broad options: • Focus on training grade 8 and 9 students in the required competences. • Design teaching of reading to develop the required competences from early grades on.   These are not mutually exclusive, of course.

13. Deconstructing the PISA Competences • PISA describes exit competences. • The national education system to determines how the competences will be achieved. • The BEP aimed to develop a sequence of competences across grades, based on the PISA proficiency level descriptors. • We used the sequence of complexity across the levels to guide us in envisaging what level 3 might look like at grade 5 and at grades 2/3.

14. The “PISA-based” Model of Reading Comprehension at Early Grades • Locate one or more independent pieces of information, where the information is explicitly stated, each piece of information meets a single criterion and there is little or no competing information. • Locating the information may or may not require making a synonymous match; and the target information may or may not be prominent in the text. • Recognise the main theme or author’s purpose in a text where the topic of the text is familiar and the required information is prominent in the text. • Make very simple inferences • Make a simple connection between information in the text and common, everyday knowledge. • Relate a simple feature of the text to their personal experience or attitudes.

15. Current Practice

16. A “PISA-based” model Questions might have the following features: • Retrieval of explicitly-stated information might involve some linguistic transformation or retrieval of less obviously salient information • There would be questions requiring simple inferences • There might be a question about the author’s purpose or the main theme of the text • There would be one or more questions requiring the reader to make a connection with their own knowledge of the world or attitudes.

17. What to do? • Differences in PISA performance between different nations reflect broad characteristics of student learning at age 15. These characteristics matter. • The PISA frameworks are the state of the art in specifying exit competences. But they define goals, not how to achieve them. • If PISA performance is to change significantly, the place to start is not grade 8. It is grade 1. You need a thorough review of objectives and instruction, and it needs to be guided by the exit competences, as defined by PISA