How many books for your summer reading?

And how can you avoid paying for them?  Since my mom gave me a Kindle as a birthday gift, I haven’t had to pay for books (well, I did buy a physical book last week).  There’s a good set of free books that deal with education on the Amazon site, and the ones I have loaded onto my Kindle have been very good reading.

The mother lode that I discovered recently is a set of reports commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, which has a funded program for Urban and Higher Education.  The reports are available free (as pdf versions) and are located here.  Click to see the Carnegie Corporation publications.

It all started when I chanced upon a report called Reading Next, which was published by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which I suppose receives funding from the Carnegie Corporation.  The Reading Next report is one of the resources I listed in my previous post for the members of the Critical Reading committee.

It turns out that the Alliance for Excellent Education also published another report called Writing Next, and this is also listed in the resources I posted previously.  This document is a terrific read, and offers scholarly evidence for strategies that improve writing skills in secondary schools; it is also reported that writing improves reading skills (and this is welcome news for us involved with the Middle States performance objectives!)

Digging deeper into the trove of publications by Carnegie Corporation, I discovered a report that I wish (I wish!) we could have found earlier. 

It is called Measure for measure: A critical consumer’s guide to reading comprehension assessments for adolescents.  A panel of experts examined nine commercially available reading assessments, and the report offers their opinions and recommendations about the use of these reading assessments.  Yes, they examined Gates-MacGinitie, the GRADE test, and also the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, which were among the assessments that we considered during our meetings as the Critical Reading Committee.  No, they did not evaluate the NWEA test (the Carnegie Corporation’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, which authored the report, evaluated paper tests).

How I wish we had had this report during our deliberations!  The Council arrived at some different opinions about the assessments compared to our conclusions.  Albeit, we had in mind the four common standards (of critical reading) that we had selected to pursue; the Council considered the assessments with other broader goals in mind.  One of the recommendations/conclusions is that “none of the tests examined emphasized critical thinking tasks.”  They further describe what they considered as examples of critical thinking tasks: “synthesizing knowledge across texts, critiquing an author’s point of view, or composing an essay in response to literature.”  The Council was surprised by this deficiency of the tests they examined, noting that “such [critical thinking] tasks appear in many national and state standards.”  (Morsy, 2011).

The report goes on to describe what this panel of reading experts believe are the “Do’s and Don’ts” of what a reading assessment system should look like.  They opine that “no single test can serve all purposes” of assessing reading comprehension.  Further in the report, the Council recommends “that educators piece together a battery of assessments that can serve various purposes and make strategic decisions about which assessments should be given to all students,” and also “one particularly promising approach is to use computer technology to facilitate the collection and analysis of diagnostic data.”  It seems that we have, in the SBP Critical Reading Committee, have been able to figure this out for ourselves.  I am somewhat disappointed that the Carnegie Council did not mention NWEA in the possibilities that they knew about concerning testing using computer technology.

Rather than continue to quote from this report, I invite you to add this to your ‘summer reading’ for the Critical Reading Committee.  Granted that we have already assented to using the NWEA test, I believe it is important to read through much of what this expert council considers as useful in employing reading assessments, something that we are about to do at St. Benedict’s.

Morsy, L., Kieffer, M., Snow C.E.  (2010).  Measure for measure: A critical consumer’s guide to reading comprehension assessments for adolescents.  New York, NY:  Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

Here is the link to that document.  Click here.  (This is the pdf document.  Because of the limitations of my declining visual acuity, I had to actually print this out on paper rather than load the pdf onto my Kindle; alas, the zoom-on-pdf function in the Kindle is challenging to use).

So, what’s your summer reading list?  Hopefully, it’s up to three reports now.  As for me…well, that’s the next post.