Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record: A Handbook for Teachers, Grades K-6

Faced with the limitations of traditional testing, teachers across the country are searching for new ways to make students' achievement in the classroom count for morea system of measurement that recognizes difference and reflects the full range of linguistic and cultural experiences. Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record is that tool, presenting a framework that translates teachers' observations into a disciplined, systematic, standards-based reporting process.

Taking the best of the British Primary Language Record (Heinemann, 1989), and revising it for American teachers, Mary Barr and her colleagues have created an assessment system that recognizes contributions form all stakeholders in the process. Teacher narratives, samples of student work, and interviews with parents combine to provide comprehensive evidence of students' progress toward agreed-upon goals and standards. Teachers summarize and record this information, using it both to inform their won teaching and to provide a more uniform and quantifiable record of literacy achievement.

Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record includes all of the materials needed to begin using the Learning Record. It offers clear explanations of each part of the Learning Record; guidelines for observing and recording student activity; and examples from actual learning records kept by classroom teachers. The book includes a complete set of reproducible forms for compiling and organizing evidence of progress in talking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as reading and writing developmental scales to guide teaching and learning during the year and provide a summary evaluation at year's end.

Mary A. Barr has directed the Center for Language Learning since its inception in 1994. The Center maintains a network of teacher leaders, experienced in the use of the Learning Record in their own classrooms, who inform its development and serve as coaches to faculties using the Learning Record.

Dana A. Craig has taught first through fifth grade for many years in California, and now in Oregon. A charter member of the Learning Record's teacher network, Craig has led district staff development in assessment and is an experienced on-site Learning Record coach.

Margaret A. Syverson is an associate professor of rhetoric and composition and codirector of the computer lab at the University of Texas at Austin. This experience has enabled her to perfect and expand the use of the Learning Record to the university level.

Currently the principal of a primary school, Dolores Fisette is an experienced Learning Record coach and a member of the Learning Record's teacher network. She has used her experience as a reading specialist and language arts coordinator to design a model for districtwide implementation of the Learning Record.