Dra assessment sample kindergarten


Literacy Toolkit - DRA -Developmental Reading Assessment

Developmental Reading Assessment is designed to be a classroom-based reading assessment for K-6. The primary purposes of the assessment are to:

  • monitor students growth on a variety of crucial skills and strategies that successful readers utilize,

  • help teachers diagnose students needs and plan for timely instruction,

  • prepare students to be successful at meeting today's classroom and testing expectations, and

  • support teachers and school districts in keeping parents and other stakeholders informed about the level of achievement.

When the comprehensive perspective of each student's reading achievement, DRA assesses student reading achievement in engagement, oral reading fluency, and comprehension skills and strategies. It also provides educators with information that helps them determine student independent reading levels.

The reading assessment has been designed to scaffold real reading situations in which students are placed daily. In this context, teachers can make objective decisions about student achievement based on observations and careful analysis of student responses using well-researched criteria.

DRA can be used on an annual or semi-annual basis to monitor and document changes in student achievement within a school year and across the middle grades. It can also be used more frequently middle grades. It can also be used more frequently with struggling readers to assure continued progress.

(Developmental Reading Assessment, Grades 4-8, 2004)

Reading Assessment Begins With Running Records

"Running Records provide an assessment of reading...(and) are designed to be taken as a child reads orally from any text. " - Marie Clay

*Running Records - September 2020

Running Records Session Slide Deck

*Running Records for the Elementary Classroom.mp4

Running Records Session Teams Recording

Running Records Resource Folder

LLI- Reading Levels Chart 2020.pdf

Resource: Reading Levels Chart

Administering the Developmental Reading Assessment- Primary

DRA2 Primary - Online Toolkit.pdf

Professional Learning Slide Deck: Primary DRA2 Training Session

Primary DRA. pdf

Professional Learning Resource: Primary DRA2 Training Handouts

DRA2 tips sheet.pdf

Professional Learning Resource: DRA 2 Tips Sheet Pamphlet

DRA Grade Level Ceiling Reading- with Kinder.pdf

DRA Grade Level Ceiling Chart: Grade Level Targets for Reading

DRA Class Chart.pdf

Class Profile: DRA Focus for Instruction (Print 11 x 17)

Primary DRA Goals_Instruction Focus.pdf

Focus for Reading Instruction for Various Reading Stages (Primary)

Administering the Developmental Reading Assessment- Junior

Junior DRA - Online Toolkit. pdf

Professional Learning Slide Deck: Junior DRA Training Session

Junior DRA.pdf

Professional Learning Resource: Junior DRA Training Handouts

DRA FAQ.pdf

DRA Grades 4-8 - Frequently Asked Questions

DRA Grade Level Ceiling Reading- with Kinder.pdf

DRA Grade Level Ceiling Chart -Grade Level Targets for Reading

Junior DRA Focus for Instruction.pdf

Focus for Reading Instruction for Various Reading Stages (Junior & Intermediate)

Junior DRA Tracking forms. pdf

Junior DRA Tracking Forms

Stages of Reading Development

Reading Stages_EmergentFinal.pdf

Reading Stages - Early.pdf

Reading Stages_Transitional.pdf

Reading Stages - ExtendingFinal.pdf

4 Reading Assessments for Kindergarten and First Grade

As teachers, we all want to get to know our students at the beginning of the year. We want to know their likes and dislikes, what they love to do, and their strengths and weaknesses. One area we all need insight into is students’ reading abilities. When it comes to reading assessments for kindergarten and first grade students, we want to do more than just assess one area of reading.

While assessments can sometimes be intimidating or overwhelming, we need them to help grow our readers’ accuracy, fluency, and comprehension skills. Let’s explore why we need them and several different reading assessments you can do to better understand where your students are.

Why Do We Need Different Reading Assessments for our Kindergarten and First Grade Readers?

Our young readers are so much more than just a reading level, although knowing that is important as well. Teachers are often familiar with how to complete reading level assessments, but we need more than that. With the latest research in the Science of Reading, we’re learning (or getting confirmation) that young readers need explicit phonics instruction in a systematic way. If students can learn letter sounds and how they work together to create words, they can move forward in reading.

By completing several different reading assessments for kindergarten and first grade readers, you’ll get a bigger picture of what each reader is capable of as a whole. Then, results can guide your instruction to differentiate for the learners in your classroom. Additionally, you will have more opportunities to track progress in specific areas. You can see which areas students need more practice and review with.

1. Phonics Skills Assessments

Assessing students’ phonemic awareness and phonics skills is a great place to start with reading assessments. Mastering phonemic awareness is a key factor in reading readiness for little learners. No matter what reading level a child is on – pre-readers to high readers, they ALL have or need a strong foundation of phonemic awareness.

You can see if students are competent in the nine areas of phonemic awareness:

  • Rhyming
  • Segmenting Syllables
  • Beginning Sounds
  • Ending Sounds
  • Medial Sounds
  • Blending Onsets and Rimes
  • Blending Phonemes
  • Deleting Phonemes
  • Segmenting Phonemes

Then, you can have students do a phonics skill assessment to check students’ understanding between letters and sounds. As students begin to match letters and letter combinations to the sounds they hear in words, they’ll use their phonemic awareness skills like segmenting and blending sounds to match the printed letter(s). So strong phonemic awareness skills can lead to strong phonics skills.

One simple phonics assessment is to have students read through a list of words that follow specific phonics patterns. For example, the list may have several cvc words, words with digraphs, words with blends, and words with long vowels.

You’ll easily be able to identify which areas of phonics your readers will need more support in.

2. Dictation Assessment

Dictation assessments are another type of reading assessment to complete for kindergarten and first grade. While dictation assessments technically involve writing, they’re a great way to see how students are processing what they have learned. Remember, reading is input and writing is output.

To complete a dictation assessment, ask students to write words or short sentences within certain phonics patterns to see if students understand how to do it. For example, to assess short /a/, ask students to write “A cat sat on a mat.” You’ll be able to see if students struggle with a specific skill.

3. High-Frequency Word Assessment

Learning high-frequency words does have a place in the classroom. Even with the new science of reading research, high-frequency words matter. How we teach them may need to change, but students still need to learn them. Why? Because…

By assessing and tracking students’ progress in master high-frequency words, we’re giving our readers a bigger bank of sight words to have to make reading easier. I have two resources to help make this easier for you and your students to monitor: Kindergarten Sight Words and First Grade Sight Words

4. Guided Reading Level Assessment

Finally, knowing what guided reading level your students are on will help you know where to start in guided reading. Do guided reading levels have a place in the classroom? Yes! Guided reading levels are simply a system developed originally by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell to help organize reading skills and strategies so that readers are not overwhelmed. The goal of guided reading is to work within a child’s instructional level.

So, you’ll need to find each child’s guided reading instructional level. Your school may have an assessment kit that makes this is like a DRA Assessment Kit. If not, I have an assessment kit that’s super easy to use and makes assessing a breeze.

This all-inclusive assessment kit has:

  • 26 books for Levels A-M
  • 1 fiction and 1 nonfiction per level
  • Books in printable and digital format to easily share on your learning platform
  • Running records for each book
  • Comprehension questions and a grading rubric
  • Instructions for how to take and score the running record
  • Teacher instructions for giving the assessment for both in-person and digital teaching
  • Parent note/letter to send home or email for virtual assessing
  • Datasheet to record data for the beginning, middle, and end of the year

FREE Reading Assessment Toolkit

By piecing all of these assessments together, you’ll have a solid, comprehensive picture of each student as a whole reader. All of these components matter and can guide your lesson planning and instruction to meet the needs of each student.

To help you get started, I created a FREE Reading Assessment Toolkit for teachers. It was carefully designed to help kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers navigate reading assessments to better help their students. It includes:

  • Phonemic Awareness Skills Checklist
  • Phonics Skill Assessment and Checklist
  • Dictation Assessment
  • Running Record Cheat Sheet
  • Comprehension Questions for Fiction and Non-fiction
  • Reading Strategies and Skills Checklist
  • Dolch and Fry’s Sight Word Lists
  • Parent Conference Forms for K-2
  • Testing Table Signs and Door Signs

Grab this FREE download today and get started mastering your reading assessments for kindergarten and first grade!

Want to use the latest research to boost your readers during small groups? This FREE guide is packed with engaging ideas to help them grow!

VSOKO in preschool

The internal system for assessing the quality of education (hereinafter referred to as VSEKO) is a well-established mechanism implemented in the context of the implementation of the educational process in kindergarten.

The organization of the VSOKO procedure is a condition for the implementation of the Federal Law of December 29, 2012 N 273-83 "On the Formation of the Russian Federation".

The internal system for assessing the quality of preschool education allows you to determine how the actual implementation of educational programs meets the level that was established by the requirements of the Federal State Educational Standard.

The procedure is based on analytical activities: the quality of the implementation of the educational process, as well as its effectiveness and provision of resources, is assessed. The verification mechanism is based on Russian legislation, federal and local regulations related to the educational sphere.

The purpose of the internal system for assessing the quality of education:

Improving the education quality management system in preschool educational institutions, as well as providing all participants in the educational process and society as a whole with objective information about the state of the education system at various levels and development trends.

Normative and legal framework of VSOKO Federal level:

- Federal Law of December 29, 2012 N 273-FZ (as amended on July 23, 2013) "On Education in the Russian Federation"

- Federal State Standard Education for Preschool Education. Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation of October 17, 2013 No. 1155 "On approval of the federal state educational standard for preschool education"

- Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of August 5, 2013 N 662 "On monitoring the education system"

- Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation of December 5, 2014 N 1547 "On approval of indicators characterizing the general criteria for assessing the quality of educational activities of organizations engaged in educational activities"

- Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation No. 462 of 14.06.2013 d. “On approval of the procedure for conducting self-examination by an educational organization”

- Order of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation No. 1324 dated December 10, 2013 “On approval of the performance indicators of an educational organization subject to self-examination”

Regulation on VSOO in MBDOU No. 179

Order on the provision of VSOKO

Order on approval of the expert group

Plan for the implementation of the VSOO in kindergarten

Preschool quality assessment in MBDOU No. 179 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000

Child development indicators according to age

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how to assess the quality of education in kindergarten

An independent assessment of the quality of education is an opportunity to objectively see how comfortable children and the teacher are in kindergarten, determine growth points and change the situation for the better. What tools to choose so that this procedure does not become an empty formality? How to achieve objective assessments? How to build work on mistakes and turn a kindergarten into a resource center? Residents of the University of Childhood Foundation share their experience with the Pedagogical Council.

The assessment is not “for show”

The staff of the kindergarten “Gnezdyshko” from the village of Purovsk, Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, was initially skeptical about the order issued by the department on assessing the quality of education. The educators were not happy with yet another formal procedure. But when the educators got acquainted with the NOC DO assessment system, and the manager attended a meeting with its developers, they changed their attitude and set to work with curiosity.

Teachers had to independently assess the situation in groups according to several parameters: the interaction of adults with children, the child's speech development, developing object-spatial activity and other areas of development in accordance with the Federal State Educational Standard. This approach did not involve tedious paper work - observations were made during classes - and helped to quickly understand how comfortable the child and the teacher are in the group, how much subjectivity is developed in children. The questions on the assessment sheets implied answers that already contain ideas for professional growth.

In accordance with the methodology, the assessment was carried out by the head of Nest, Olga Zakoretskaya, who was trained in the Kindergarten for Children project of the University of Childhood Foundation. According to her, the presence of leadership in the classroom is a common practice, and neither children nor teachers experience additional stress from this. The schedule of visits was made in advance. The manager observed the situation without interfering in the processes, made notes, and after that the educators had the opportunity to ask their questions.

The results were unexpected. For example, the level of the developmental subject-spatial environment was high, but several program areas gave low scores.

Another procedure is an electronic survey of parents. 96 respondents were interviewed in Gnezdyshka: they found out their educational needs and found out how much they coincide with the vision of educators. The competence of teachers and the openness of the leadership were also assessed. A survey of parents showed that it is important for them that their children have more opportunities to play and communicate with their peers.

Olga Zakoretskaya notes that the NOC DO turned out to be a very convenient tool that allowed the garden to see its strengths and weaknesses and determine which indicators need to be changed. According to Olga, the new tool opened her eyes to those things that are hidden in the daily routine, and among its advantages she noted that it sets up a dialogue for all participants in the educational process. For those who want to master this assessment system and improve their professionalism, the head advises to visit the website of the Kindergarten for Children project, where you can get acquainted with assessment tools, as well as invite an expert for an external assessment.

Not my own expert

Self-examination is great. But are its results always objective?

This was found out in the Voronezh "Child Development Center - Kindergarten No. 196". During the pandemic, educators did not waste time, took a course on ECERS scales in the Kindergarten for Children project and also got acquainted with the assessment of the quality of education.

After training, they conducted an independent check, first each in their own groups, then in neighboring groups. The evaluation results turned out to be high, but the kindergarten administration decided not to stop there and invited an external expert of the Kindergarten for Children project for an independent evaluation.

The indicators of independent verification turned out to be almost two times lower than those received by the teachers themselves.

It turned out that the reason for the discrepancies was in a different understanding of some evaluation criteria, the project expert held a consultation with the management and teachers and provided recommendations. The administration decided that teachers themselves would choose where to start improving.

The first step was to develop group rules. Once every two weeks, the educators got together, shared their best practices, and discussed the results. Psychologists also joined them: they conducted a training "How to better understand and hear a child."

Solving all issues at once in the garden is not taken - not productive. Tempo - one for each general meeting. The next goals are to increase the communicative and gaming competencies of teachers and replenish the subject environment.

Kindergarten as a resource center

Tomsk Kindergarten No. 73 began developing its own assessment system two years ago. Before that, only monitoring was prescribed in the main educational program, which was reduced to the results of mastering the main educational program. But it was clear to the team that the main indicator of quality is the conditions in which the children and teachers are. In search of suitable tools, the senior educator Anastasia Yushkova got acquainted with the ECERS scales.

Yushkova was trained and introduced a new system to educators, taught them how to conduct self-assessment. The results of the first experience, like those of Voronezh colleagues, turned out to be overestimated, and after that, at seminars with experts, each teacher received meaningful recommendations and drew up his own development trajectory. Educators with the same growth zones were combined into groups, and Anastasia herself accompanies them.

Sadik was offered to be a training ground for internal ECERS experts. This allowed him to become not only a resource center, but also get additional opportunities to assess the quality of his education.

The experience of these kindergartens demonstrates that the assessment of the quality of education is needed by non-higher inspectors, it is needed by the kindergarten, its staff and management in order to see what to strive for, what to focus on, how to make conditions for children and teachers even better. Self-assessment helps a lot in this, but it is not always objective, because some teachers tend to overestimate points or they do not have enough experience to work with scales. That is why there are such projects as "Kindergarten for Children", where you can improve your competence in the field of assessing the quality of preschool education for free or order an independent external assessment by experts.


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