Assessing Reading and Writing: Building a More Complete Picture for Middle School Assessment. Technical Report No. 500

The intention of this report is to build a strong case for a portfolio approach to assessment of reading and writing during the middle school years. A portfolio is both a collection of the artifacts of students' reading and writing and a disposition toward assessment. This disposition is characterized by the belief that assessment must be continuous, multidimensional, collaborative, knowledge-based, and authentic. Recommendations for portfolios are based upon the conviction that records gathered while students are engaged in functional and contextualized literacy tasks will ultimately prove more useful to both teachers and students than will any set of numbers derived from tests that have little relevance to the purposes and needs of either students or teachers. The principles and continua put forward should be regarded as a conceptual framework to use in developing and evaluating assessment strategies. The array of assessment opportunities available to teachers is limited only by their creativity, knowledge of the reading process, and grasp of sound assessment criteria. The report describes the portfolio assessment practices in detail and illustrates how they must be applied in the classroom by means of five "scenarios." Appendixes include: A Schema for Scoring Retellings (The Retelling Profile), A Wholistic Scoring Scale, An Analytic Scoring Scale, A Writing Analysis Checklist, and A Self-Evaluation Questionnaire. One figure and 53 references are included. (MG)