Benchmarking

Today was a very short day at practicum because I had to do an assessment at another school for one of my classes. However within the short amount of time, the teacher and I managed to benchmark 4 students. They can be quite time consuming so this was very exciting! Report cards are coming up so many of the teachers are frantically trying to finish their assessments. The assessments ran very smoothly today except one student made me and the teacher feel very confused and frazzled. It was interesting because we had to complete 3 assessments for this one student. At first, we put him at a level that he was not quite at. We based this off of his previous assessment earlier in the year and therefore put him at a level higher than his last in order to see if there were improvements made. Unfortunately he did have some trouble with this and demonstrated many errors in his reading and errors with his comprehension. We told him to read a new story which was a couple levels lower in order to see if this was a more accurate representation of his level of reading. This was very interesting because he read the story very good. There were minimal errors made and he could retell the main events of the story well, but he had trouble answering any type of comprehension question. Although he stated most of the answers in his retelling of the story which is the first thing to ask the student, once we asked him the comprehension questions in a different way, he had trouble answering them. Although he had just said the answer a few moments prior he did not understand and often replied with “I don’t know”. For example: he understood that the little boys mom tricked the boy and told him there was a car accident on the road they would be taking to the concert in order to scare  the boy and get rid of his hiccups. Therefore he understood there was not an actual accident but it was a joke; however, he could not answer the comprehension questions correctly. Of course I am not very familiar with assessment anyways so I have nothing to compare it to, but my teacher has and she found this puzzling. She said she hasn’t seen that before. I am not sure what factors could have effected this particular student. There is a lot that goes into benchmarking and although a student may have great reading skills, if they cannot understand the story, then they can not be put at a particular level based on their reading ability alone. It is the whole package that is considered. As well today, I told the students that I will be taking them to Grouse Mountain in May for a field trip and seeing how excited they were made my day!!