Informal assessment

A fourth grade Mexican-American student , Isabel Ornelas , was assigned a writing task that required her to develop a narrative about a family spending an evening together . The informal assessment of the work required that she come forward and read her passage to the teacher . Her reading of a passage she had written was helpful to show how far she had progressed with her pronunciation of English . The writing task provides a better estimate than free response because it removes some of the pressure of the moment . It therefore gives the teacher a more

complete picture of how much knowledge of the grammatical structure of English Isabel has captured

Isabel was assessed to be a developing writer (TeacherVision , 2008 , as she provided an adequate title , An evening with the Ornelases ' and introduced the main idea in the first sentence . The sequence of events for the evening demonstrated an appropriate amount of ing , though some transitional events were left out that would have improved the overall flow of her work . Her use of paragraphing was not uniform throughout . Some paragraphs were indeed too long and contained multiple ideas that would have been better separated . However , some of her other paragraphs were self-contained and were found to be good paragraphs This aspect made it clear that her organization skills were developing normally , and that her knowledge of English was the only real barrier to her self-expression

Grammar is the main area in which Isabel 's English language skills show themselves , and it was found that Isabel had some problems with verb declensions (endings . Therefore , she showed some subject-verb disagreement in number . She also sometimes misplaced object pronouns - placing them before rather than after the verb . This probably stems from her knowledge of Spanish , as this language most often places object pronouns before the verb . Her use of punctuation was adequate . She also demonstrated that some outside research (dictionary work ) was done for the assignment through her use of some new vocabulary words that were appropriate to her . Overall , her spelling was unconventional , and this also hinted at her knowledge of Spanish . Such words as happy and hanger ' were written as jappy ' and janger ' She did show a general mastery over the spelling of such words that would be considered sight words ' for her level , and this demonstrates that she has been exposed to (and is learning ) the most common English words and their spellings

Reference

TeacherVision (2008 . Rubrics for writing : elementary /intermediate in The reading teacher 's book lists (Edward Fry . Pearson Education Available : http /www .teachervision .fen .com /writing /printable /6313 .html

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Informal assessment...