Informal and Formal Reading Assessments

¶ … standardized tests and there is math association with the results. On the other hand informal reading assessments do not have the same formal data requirements and is based more on performance. These two kinds of assessments will be critiqued in this paper.

Formal Reading Assessments

Parents should know and understand not only why their children are being accessed, but through which process the assessment is being conducted. The more parents are involved in the education of their children, the closer parents will be to opportunities to participate and contribute to those important years of education. Brenda Weaver writes in Scholastic magazine that first of all, whether it is informal or formal, assessments need to match up with the purpose of assessing any particular student. Formal assessments are generally used to assess "overall achievement" and to "compare a student's performance with others at their age or grade."

Parents should be informed as to the purpose of reading assessments, and they should be assured this is not an intelligence test but rather it is used to determine "…the level of text that will challenge students" and will "…motivate them to read rather than causing frustration" (Rubin, 2011, p. 606). Formal Reading assessments are standardized tests, designed to evaluate elementary students based on formulae designed by a corporation or a scholastic organization, and they tend not to be specific to any location or nationality or ethnicity.

Disadvantages of Formal Reading Assessments

Jim Rubin notes that many school districts use standardized (formal) assessment tests, and generally those standardized tests are designed to assess: "phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension" (Rubin, 606). However, Rubin questions "the wisdom" of a teacher who uses only one formal assessment test; using "only one tool" (test) to pass judgment on a student's reading ability is not the smartest or best way to make an accurate assessment, the author of this article asserts. Rather than a standardized assessment test of a student's reading ability, Rubin suggests using an informal test like the "cloze test" or the "Informal Reading Inventories" assessment test. Either one of those informal assessment tests "…offers a classroom teacher an opportunity to exert control of the process," after all, the teacher knows best which reading material is appropriate for each student in his or her classroom (Rubin, 606).

Researches have been questioning the "reliability" of settling on standardized assessment tests from commercial publishers for some time because the "validity" of assessment based on a single standardized test "…can be questionable," Rubin continues (607). To get a valid picture of the reading comprehension of a student, teachers should not rely "…exclusively on the scores from a single standardized test" -- in particular, when a teacher has a diversity of ethnicities and cultures in his or her classroom (Rubin, 606).

What should a teacher do regarding formal vs. informal assessments? For one thing, since teachers have little or no say in the administration of formal tests, they can break out of that conundrum and instead they can "…feel empowered" when they use alternative -- or their own -- assessment strategies (Rubin, 607).

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) -- a formal assessment test that is given to 4th graders in forty countries very five years -- has its disadvantages, according to the Center for Public Education (Ogle, CPE, 2007). A first pertinent question is, why test 4th graders? The CPE answer to that question is this: because 4th grade represents a "key transitional point in children's development as readers" worldwide, and at this point in a child's education, formal reading instruction is either ending or about to end (Ogle, CPE).

There are several negative aspects of the PIRLS project: a), it is a "huge, complex undertaking, costing millions of dollars and involving thousands of people worldwide"; b) the PIRLS is "fraught with technical challenges" and because it is international, "problems exist"; and c) in order to present accurate assessment results, there must be translations from German to English, French to English, and myriad other translations, and this process can be fraught with challenges and errors (Ogle, CPE).

Informal Reading Assessments

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal The Reading Teacher, Nina L. Nilsson discusses informal reading inventories (IRI), or otherwise referred to as reading assessments. These assessments let the teacher know whether students are relying on "…one cueing system (i.e. graphophonic, syntactic, or semantic cueing system) to the exclusion of the others," the way beginners tend to do; or if the student is using a "balance of strategies, as mature readers" -- who are more advanced in their reading skills -- in the process of their development "…when they encounter challenges while processing text" (Nilsson, 2008, p. 526).

Nilsson carefully reviewed, analyzed and critiqued eight IRIs that have been published since 2002, the year No Child Left Behind went into effect. For most of the assessment tests that Nilsson analyzed, the way the questions were phrased (either as stand-alone questions or linked to "retelling rubrics or scoring guides") checked the reader's comprehension in these areas: a) the grasp that the reader had of "narrative and expository text structure"; and b) "various dimensions or levels of reading comprehension…literal and inferential comprehension" (529). Six of those eight IRIs measured the narrative text comprehension of the students by focusing on "character, setting, problem or goal resolution"; four of the eight zeroed in on question strategies that were based on "levels of importance of information" (Nilsson, 529).

Advantages and disadvantages of Informal Assessment Testing

Author Luis Rosado points out that informal assessments can be (and often are) very basic and uncomplicated. For example, a teacher can develop his or her own system, such as asking a child to "retell a story" which affords the teacher an idea about the student's level of comprehension (Rosado, 2006, p. 89). The teacher can make a "checklist of competencies, skills, or requirements," which gives the teacher a way to "capture behaviors that cannot be accurately measured with a paper and pencil test" (i.e., a standardized test) (Rosado, 89). The disadvantage of a checklist, Rosado explains, is the structure of the checklist, which can be inflexible.