TRT Podcast #180: Which literacy assessments are worth you and your students’ time? – with Sean Morrisey
Sean Morrisey, former school psychologist turned fifth grade teacher, walks us through the many different literacy assessments teachers administer. Which are useful, and which are a waste of time? You’ll love this practical episode!
Listen to the episode here
Full episode transcript
Resources to learn more
- Stephanie Stollar’s podcast episode on using MTSS
- Sean Morrisey’s podcast episode on vocabulary instruction with Melissa & Lori Love Literacy
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Jane Pollard, M. Ed
I am flummoxed by the amount of testing too! We have the same menu of testing as Sean, but thankfully gave up the balanced literacy benchmarks.. I believe that local school boards like to have their hand in the assessment choices. In our K- 8 school, primary teachers might prefer not to do the CAT tests, but intermediate grades like these results. Therefore we do end up including grades 2-8 in the CAT testing so we can see growth.
We have trimmed back some of our assessing, but it seems like there is not enough instructional time overall with the amount of testing is done. Wish I knew the answer. Thanks for addressing this on your podcast.
Heather Groth, Customer Support
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Jane!
Khanh Pham
This was a great episode about assessment, so informative and helpful. You mentioned a 10-minute universal screener—could you please share the name of that assessment?
Anna Geiger
I was referring to Acadience Learning. Another example is Dibels 8.