Developing A Reading Project Assessment to Stimulate Students’ Critical Thinking and Creativity

Assessment is a part of the learning assessment phase of the teaching and learning process. It is used to evaluate whether the education goals have been reached by looking at the process and product of learning outcomes. However, many teachers need assistance in developing a suitable assessment system and instrument. Then it should be in line with the teaching and learning priorities of the 2013 curriculum, which enable teachers to challenge students' analytical and creative thinking. This study aimed to explain the development of project-based reading assessments to stimulate students' critical thinking and creativity of the tenth graders of X IPS 3 at SMAN 12 Semarang during the academic year 2018/2019. To construct project-based reading assessments, the researcher and the teacher collaborated. The module was revised based on expert advice until the main field testing was completed. The data collection methods were using a questionnaire, interview, observation, and examination to obtain quantitative and qualitative data. The study discovered that when students were given project-based reading assessments, their scores increased. According to the results of a paired sampled test, the students' mean score changed significantly after the post-test relative to the pre-test. Students' comprehension skills, critical thinking, and creative thinking have all improved as a result of project-based reading assessments. In conclusion, the project based assessment is applicable for teaching learning activities to stimulate high school students’ critical thinking and creativity.

Studi Fenomenologi: Penilaian Membaca dalam Pembelajaran Bahasa Indonesia di Sekolah Menengah Atas Pekanbaru

Reading assessment is a form of assessment activity carried out by educators in assessing students' reading. This study uses a phenomenological approach to explore teachers' experiences as participants in learning to read stories, read poetry and read descriptive texts in developing reading assessments. This study involved 15 Indonesian language teachers and conducted in-depth interviews about reading assessments in schools. The theories used in this research are Setiadi (2016), Abdul (2003), Tarigan (1994), Yunus (2012), Tampubolon (2015), Razak (2001), Nurhayati (2009), Djiwandono (2011), and the theory of Burhan Nurgiyantoro (2014). In-depth interview analysis in this study shows that the assessment of reading saga pays attention to the assessment of speech sounds, words, sentences, letters, language, readings, pays attention to reading pauses, sentence breaks, paragraph breaks, sentence content, letter content, punctuation marks, appreciates the content. In contrast, the construction of poetry reading assessment includes the assessment of diction sounds, sounds, letters, sentences, rhymes, rhythms, stanzas, the figure of speech, confidence, language style, appreciation. Descriptive text-based assessment is to assess the accuracy of diction (use of vocabulary, conjunctions between sentences, clarity of language sounds); the assessment of the accuracy of the sentence structure of the reading pays attention to 3 assessments, namely the arrangement of sentence patterns, stringing sentences and the form of sentences used; and assessing the spelling and writing used including the assessment of punctuation, use of capital letters. Educators can use this research recommendation on the construction of reading assessment in high school in the concept of reading assessment in schools.

Always at the Bottom: Ideologies in Assessment of Emergent Bilinguals

Recent scholarship has identified how the reading assessment process can be improved by adapting to and accounting for emergent bilinguals’ multilingual resources. While this work provides guidance about how teachers can take this approach within their assessment practices, this article strengthens and builds on this scholarship by combining translanguaging and raciolinguistic lenses to examine the ideologies that circulate through assessment. By comparing interview data from English as a new language and dual-language bilingual teachers, we found that while reading assessments fail to capture the complexity of all emergent bilinguals’ reading abilities, they particularly marginalize emergent bilinguals of color. Thus, we expose the myths of neutrality and validity around reading assessment and demonstrate how they are linked to ideologies about race and language. We offer a critical translingual approach to professional learning that encourages teachers to grapple with these ideologies and shift toward a more critical implementation of reading assessments.

Factual Question Generation System Using Pro Semantic Ranker

In today’s internet world the amount of materials available to learn and gain knowledge is immense in numbers, which has given access to a lot of people to gain knowledge easily. Is it possible to find out if someone has read this sentence? To arrive at a conclusion of whether or not someone has read something, we can ask them to summarize its contents or question them about it. We can start with basic questions that deal with the title or the abstract, and progress to more challenging questions. A good example of this process would be a primary school teacher questioning his or her students on the basics of what they are reading to make sure that they are learning. It is a time-consuming process to create the basic questions and reading assessments that are commonly used, and can be quite taxing on the educator. This paper focuses on automating that time-intensive process. To be precise, this paper deals with the problem of generation of the factual questions in an automated manner from stand-alone texts.

Engaging with Text: The Effectiveness of Content Literacy and Active Learning Strategies in Online Introductory Accounting Courses

Language and literacy are innate to learning. The accounting language is technical and specific, and students must become literate in the discipline to be able to critically read and understand accounting text and apply their knowledge. Introductory accounting courses are typically difficult for students, who struggle to simply pass the course. Students memorize the concepts but cannot internalize the information. Lack of active reading and literacy skills hinders higher order thinking needed to solve problems. The study discussed in this paper involves two fully online introductory accounting courses where one of the courses is taught leveraging literacy strategies (experimental course) and the other without literacy instruction (control course). Initial and final reading assessments are implemented in both courses and the results demonstrate an overall greater improvement in students’ comprehension, analysis, context and evaluation skills in the experimental class.

Child-Centred Teaching: Helping Each Child to Reach Their Full Potential

Research has shown that schoolteachers often prepare children for success in standardized reading assessments by ‘teaching to the test.’ Concurrently, research exploring children’s emergent literacies and ‘school readiness’ has shown that early childhood teachers often feel pressured to ‘prepare’ children for school and may do so by focusing on print-related literacies, to the detriment of earlier stages of the oral-to-print continuum. This raises the concern that teaching children as a group, preparing them for the next ‘stage of education,’ will disadvantage children who are working below or above expected levels of development. Our study explores the teaching approaches used with a group of foundation-year children who achieved more advanced reading outcomes than children from four adjacent classrooms in their first year of schooling. We collected the reading and letter-identification outcomes of 16 children in the teacher’s foundation-year class and interviewed her about her practices. Findings showed that the teacher used her knowledge of what the children should achieve in standardized assessments as a minimum expectation and moved beyond the content of such assessments when warranted, as determined by informal assessments. As a result, every child in the class met, and many exceeded, minimum reading standards by year’s end. We conclude that using an individualized, child-centred pedagogy, informed by a combination of standardized and informal assessments, allowed the teacher to support her students to develop a range of reading abilities and to reach their full potential.

Reading outcomes of students with intellectual disability on statewide assessments

Education laws in the U.S. hold schools accountable for including students with intellectual disability on statewide reading assessments. Students with intellectual disability have been taking general or alternate reading assessments over the past two decades. However, very little attention has been given to the results of these assessments. The purpose of this study was to examine reading outcomes of students with intellectual disability on statewide general and alternate assessments in a Midwestern state in the U.S. We also examined whether students with intellectual disability’s reading outcomes varied across traditional and innovative school types. Results from descriptive analyses showed that a very low percentage of students with intellectual disability performed at the proficient level or above on 5th and 8th grades reading assessments. Also, students with intellectual disability’s reading proficiency levels did not significantly differ across school types. Implications of these results are discussed and recommendations for future research are provided.

Which Data Do Elementary School Teachers Use to Determine Reading Difficulties in Their Students?

Small-group interventions allow for tailored instruction for students with learning difficulties. A crucial first step is the accurate identification of students who need such an intervention. This study investigated how teachers decide whether their students need a remedial reading intervention. To this end, 64 teachers of 697 third-grade students from Germany were asked to rate whether a reading intervention for their students was “not necessary,” “potentially necessary,” or “definitely necessary.” Independent experimenters tested the students’ reading and spelling abilities with standardized tests, and a subsample of 370 children participated in standardized tests of phonological awareness and vocabulary. Findings show that teachers’ decisions with regard to students’ needing a reading intervention overlapped more with results from standardized spelling assessments than from reading assessments. Hierarchical linear models indicated that students’ spelling abilities, along with phonological awareness and vocabulary, explained variance in teachers’ ratings over and above students’ reading skills. Teachers, thus, relied on proximal cues such as spelling skills to reach their decision. These findings are discussed in relation to clinical standards and educational contexts. Findings indicate that the teachers’ assignment of children to interventions might be underspecified, and starting points for specific teacher training programs are outlined.