Abstract:

This session will introduce international audiences to a recently developed early literacy assessment tool, the Listening to Reading–Watching While Writing Protocol (LTR-WWWP) and present findings from a small mixed-methods study of 11 elementary teachers who worked with the tool over one academic year. The LTR-WWWP is an informal formative assessment tool designed to support classroom teachers and literacy professionals in English-speaking, primary settings in observing children read aloud and/or write.

Listening to children read aloud is a crucial instructional practice that provides teachers with opportunities to observe children’s acquisition of graphophonemic relationships in context, as well as to prompt or coach children in the act of reading (Duke, 2020). Traditional approaches to listening to children read aloud, such as running records (Clay, 1993), often accompanied by miscue analysis (Goodman, 1973), present some challenges in that
(1) they draw attention to a narrow range of aspects of reading,
(2) they yield data that is very open-ended, making them vulnerable to misinterpretation and
(3) may result in misunderstandings about how children learn to read and what sorts of information are valuable to attend to (Davis, Jones, & Samuelson, 2021).

In contrast, the LTR-WWWP directs teachers and literacy professionals to attend to many important aspects of the reading process: reading of single-syllable and/or multisyllabic words, word identification strategies, comprehension monitoring, vocabulary strategies, fluency, comprehension, and compreaction (or what one “does” with comprehension; Duke, 2020). The tool accommodates adaptive administration and encourages thoughtful questioning on the part of the teacher to better illuminate and understand the student’s reading processes and metacognition. We also designed the LTR-WWWP to take advantage of the deep relationship between reading and writing (Shanahan, 2016); in addition to the tool’s uses for reading it can also be used to observe children during any stage of the writing process, as well as in writing in response to reading. The LTR-WWWP is designed not to yield a level or score, but rather one or more instructional targets appropriate to the student that may be used to inform the creation of flexible, needs-based small groups instead of ability-based groupings.

This mixed-methods study describes the experiences of 11 primary teachers who, across the 2022-2023 academic year, engaged in five workshops designed and led by one of the tool’s authors. Workshops were designed based on ongoing teacher feedback and covered:
(1) how to use the tool for reading and writing,
(2) using the results to inform instruction,
(3) centering equity while using the tool by reflecting linguistic differences appropriately, and
(4) inviting the child into the assessment process.

The session will outline:
(1) qualitative and quantitative trends in teachers’ use of the tool,
(2) the affordances and challenges of using the LTR-WWWP as described by participating teachers, and
(3) “lessons learned” regarding how best to introduce and provide practice with the tool; i.e., what works in helping teachers shift their assessment practices towards ones that are more flexible, responsive, and child-centered.

Keywords:

Early literacy, assessment, reading, writing.