Why should flexible grouping be used in the reading classroom? ✔✔Flexible grouping allows teachers to tailor instruction to address students' changing needs. When teachers use flexible grouping they are considering the always-changing strengths and weaknesses of students and they can group the students temporarily to best meet instructional needs. What is the primary purpose of a norm-referenced test? ✔✔Indicating where a student performs in comparison to a group of similar students. Norm-referenced tests allow a student's skills to be compared with the skills of other students in a similar age group. These tests are developed by administering a set of test items to a group of students; the performance of those in the norming group is used as a basis for comparison. A student at the conventional stage of writing development will primarily write... ✔✔Words that are often correctly spelled and include storybook language such as "Once upon a time." Students in the conventional stage of writing development have a basic grasp of writing words. At this stage they are ready to write with a purpose, such as telling a story. Storybook language is often included in their writing as they model their own stories after the stories they have read. A second-grade teacher uses an assessment tool for coding, scoring, and analyzing a student's oral reading behavior. What is the best technique to use for this process? ✔✔Running record After administering a phonemic awareness test, what would be the most appropriate next step a teacher would take with students who scored low on the assessment? ✔✔Teaching blending and segmenting sounds A teacher reads a series of graded passages to a student to assess the skill of creating meaning from written language when decoding is not a factor. What would identify the highest level at which the student can comprehend 75 percent of the material? ✔✔Listening capacity. When a teacher reads a series of graded texts to a student, the teacher is assessing the student's ability to comprehend written language when the student doesn't have to attend to decoding issues which are present when the text is read by the student. Ms. Osborn teaches a variety of reading strategies to help her students become strategic readers. The strategies include predicting, previewing, monitoring comprehension while reading, generating questions, and summarizing. Which of the following most likely explains Ms. Osborn's purpose in teaching the strategies? ✔✔Research has shown that reading comprehension improves when teachers provide explicit instruction. According to research cited in Reutzel and Cooter's Strategies for Reading Assessment and Instruction: Helping Every Child Succeed, evidence supports that providing explicit instruction in comprehension strategies improves student literacy development. A teacher plans to differentiate reading instruction for students but first needs to gather and analyze assessment data to determine students' needs. What would be two effective ways to assess? ✔✔Informal reading inventories and Formative reading assessments. Informal Reading Inventories (IRIs) are effective. IRIs are collection of word lists and leveled passages that are used to provide a quick snapshot of students' reading abilities. They are often used to determine where in a commercial reading series students should begin. IRIs utilize leveled sentences and passages to determine a student's reading level, and they focus primarily on literal recall as a means to determine comprehension. Formative assessments are effective in helping to diagnose the individual needs of students. Formative assessments are on-the-spot assessments given while our students are reading or engaging in pre and post reading activities. This type of assessment should be given frequently to provide feedback on our lessons and student progress. A fourth-grade teacher is developing a writing assignment, the goal of which is to help students persuade readers to agree with an opinion. What kind of writing prompt would be most appropriate for the assignment? ✔✔Should a limit be placed on the amount of time children spend watching television? This prompt requires students to establish a position and provide reasons to support it so that readers can be persuaded to agree