Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I am sorry I can only give this book 5 stars!!! I have had to read a great many books over the past few years as requirements for one or another class. This book is part of a list of books I had to purchase. It is also the ONLY book I have asked my department head to purchase for the teacher's library. I think every educator should read this book.

Calkins is well established in the field of literacy and the workshop approach to teaching reading. This title, however, adds a much-needed perspective on ways to identify the discrete skills necessary for students to do well in the kinds of testing that now dominate instruction (with all the frustrated sighs that accompany that statement). Calkins et al don't hesitate to identify the flaws and follies that permeate standardized testing, but they do point out the salient fact that if students aren't doing well in testing, it's "not just the test". There may be pieces missing that, when put into place, can assist students in conquering this most questionable hurdle set in front of them--now, and for some time to come.

This team of teacher-researchers set out on the daunting task of evaluating how succesful performance on reading tests requires a different approach than where teaching-for-understanding takes place. Their analysis, presented in a kind of first-person-plural, is presented clearly, well-documented, highly reflective, and sufficiently flexible to appeal to all elementary teachers. It helped restore my sanity; see if it might do the same for you!