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■ ■ ■ STUDENT ASSESSMENT/PROGRESS MONITORING ■ Educational organizations, including the National Association for the Education of Young Children, place great emphasis on assessment of child progress. Educators must know how ■ children are progressing and also what challenges they are encountering. Teachers have always observed children, talked with them about what they are doing, noted interesting ■ things they said and did, recorded accomplishments and shared information with families. However, the new approach today is organizing and systematizing the information to ■ improve services for individual children and to improve programs overall. Assessment ■ helps with monitoring children's development and learning. It guides planning and decision making. It identifies children who might benefit from special services. Assessment aids in ■ reporting to and communicating with others. Also, it helps educators know what areas of the program need improvement. ■ Assessment is part of instruction. All students are progress monitored regularly. In ■ preschool through grade two some common assessments are used at the Coombs School. ■ For literacy,the Reading Street Assessments are used which include the baseline assessment at the beginning of the school year, unit benchmark assessments throughout the year and an ■ end-of-the-book literacy assessment. ■ Along with that, DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills—University of Oregon) is used in the fall, winter and spring. DIBELS assesses literacy fluency in areas ■ such as letter naming, initial sounds, phoneme segmentation, nonsense words and oral ■ reading. Teachers may also use observation checklists and anecdotal notes. DRAB (Developmental Reading Assessments) are also done with kindergarten children at the end ■ of the year and with all children twice yearly in grades one and two. DRAs are used for comprehension evaluation. Running Records (a part of DRA, or done independently) are ■ also used which pinpoint precisely a child's reading skill and miscues in reading. These assessment tools allow staff to specifically design instruction to meet each child's needs. ■ Student portfolios are also maintained for all children preschool through grade two. This is ■ an assessment portfolio which contains information of student progress. Work sampling online (in preschool),math samples, writing samples, and literacy assessments are collected which profile or give a snapshot of student progress, growth and development. Grade two ■ portfolios are then sent to the Quashnet School for children transitioning to grade three. These portfolios are maintained right through to grade six. ■ There will be a parent meeting scheduled at the beginning of each year to discuss ■ assessment that goes along with our instruction. Parents/guardians will be updated ■ regarding student progress at parent/teacher conferences in November and at other reasonable times requested by a parent/guardian. ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ 18 ■ ■