Scientific Reading Assessment: Targeted Intervention and Follow-Up Lessons

 I expect to see dog-eared copies of this book on many classroom teachers’ desks for years to come.
–Frank Serafini, Author of Around the Reading Workshop in 180 Days

 

Targeted intervention for targeted instruction. That’s the goal. But in busy, unpredictable classrooms where students have a variety of needs, a simple, smart idea like that can seem impossible to achieve. You need to isolate the source of readers’ difficulties and determine the best way to address them. Complicating matters is an education climate with ever-increasing calls for accountability. You need assessment strategies that lead to both effective, differentiated instruction and that document individual student progress. You need Scientific Reading Assessment.

 

Scientific Reading Assessment is both a practical guide to the whys and wherefores of assessment and a goldmine of more than thirty-five follow-up reading lessons. First Manning, Underbakke, and Hurt-Chumley ask and answer some of the toughest questions about the types, uses, and pitfalls of various assessment instruments. They offer big-picture thinking about the small observations that lead you to new insights about your readers. Then the authors show you how to map your assessments onto planning and instruction, offering not only thirty-five proven, effective lessons, but also strategies for identifying exactly which works best for specific kinds of reading difficulties. These powerful lessons incorporate widely known children’s literature, include specific instructional cues and reproducible forms, are based on psycholinguistic theory and research, and offer extensions that get families and other caregivers involved in a child’s literacy learning.

Maryann Manning is a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.