History of the First Australians Set 4 (Books 61-80) - Assessment Guide

The Assessment Guide for History of the First Australians Set 4 enables educators to observe various reading strategies and behaviours being adopted over time, including the crucial development of reading fluency and comprehension. This resource provides opportunities to diagnostically evaluate where students are at across both their Reading Fluency (via the Reading Record and Multidimensional Fluency Scale) and across all 3 levels of comprehension: Thinking Within the Text (Literal Comprehension); Thinking Beyond the Text (Evaluative Comprehension) and Thinking About the Text (Inferential Comprehension). The Post Assessment activities help to extend teachers’ knowledge of their students’ spelling ability and vocab range as well as their ability to consolidate their thinking and understanding through various writing opportunities.

• Page 1 includes a Reading Record extract from the relevant story which teachers can administer to determine where their students are at – the analysis section givens them guidance about how to determine their students’ reading levels and can be used to inform next steps for instruction as part of their literacy program, including more appropriate matching of text to students, along with greater accuracy when grouping students for guided reading
• Page 1 bottom section includes a standardised Fluency Grid which teachers can shade according to where they feel their students are at, regarding their expression and volume (how well they pronounce words and how loudly they read), their phrasing, their reading smoothness and their reading pace
• When teachers use this fluency scale regularly across a number of books, they can start to gauge how students are progressing with their reading fluency and can include these pages in their student portfolios which can be referred to at Student Teacher meetings to show progress and areas of improvement required
• Page 2 – the Comprehension Conversation – enables teachers to sharpen their observation of students’ reading behaviours by hearing their thinking and understanding through talk and strengthening the connection from assessment to instruction. Questions are provided for each level of comprehension addressed, eg Within the Text (Literal), Beyond the Text (Evaluative) – big picture comprehension ideas, and About the Text (Inferential) – eg what the author is inferring. These questions will help teachers to determine whether students are just reading automatically with no/limited understanding or actually reading comprehending what they are reading – this is crucial to further reading development and learning opportunities
• Page 3 – Post Assessment Activities – include spelling and vocab work, sentence work (taps into grammar and punctuation) and a Writing Time activity where students can take what they’ve learned and extend these understandings through various relevant writing activities (focuses on thinking beyond the text).