Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record: A Handbook for Teachers, Grades K-6

by Mary Barr, Margaret A. Syverson

Faced with the limitations of traditional testing, teachers across the country are searching for new ways to make students' achievement in the classroom count for morea system of measurement that recognizes difference and reflects the full range of linguistic and cultural experiences. Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record is that tool, presenting a framework that translates teachers' observations into a disciplined, systematic, standards-based reporting process. Taking the best of the British Primary Language Record (Heinemann, 1989), and revising it for American teachers, Mary Barr and her colleagues have created an assessment system that recognizes contributions form all stakeholders in the process. Teacher narratives, samples of student work, and interviews with parents combine to provide comprehensive evidence of students' progress toward agreed-upon goals and standards. Teachers summarize and record this information, using it both to inform their won teaching and to provide a more uniform and quantifiable record of literacy achievement. Assessing Literacy with the Learning Record includes all of the materials needed to begin using the Learning Record. It offers clear explanations of each part of the Learning Record; guidelines for observing and recording student activity; and examples from actual learning records kept by classroom teachers. The book includes a complete set of reproducible forms for compiling and organizing evidence of progress in talking, listening, reading, and writing, as well as reading and writing developmental scales to guide teaching and learning during the year and provide a summary evaluation at year's end.

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 1999

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I taught two sections of FYC using the Learning Record last semester, which was only one semester, but reading this book made me even more ambivalent about my LR experience. I feel that many of the things recommended in this book’s scheme were missing from our UT implication. For example, we never did any grade-norming across classes, and in fact many of us were confused about grading the portfolios, and we focused exclusively on writing in our assessments, which is too bad, because I feel that collecting information about critical reading, speaking and listening could have benefited our students as well as the their teachers. And we certainly didn’t make personal connections with students’ parents (25)—FERPA might not approve. And how do teachers decide what’s best for their students—one teacher identies “elegant” and “silted” prose, but the audience and the genre are never discussed (45).My main concern, though, is that, as these kinds of schemes are wont to do, the examples have been cherry-picked and that the LR is the sort of thing that only works with a certain kind of student. One student says her favorite book is Pride and Prejudice and “likes to read her old sister’s university books” (24). This kind of student—the kind that came from a strong culture of “the education process”—performed well in my LR classes. The hard-working bilingual international engineering student and the over-achiever who had to put in a lot of hours into her out-patient treatment and athletic obligations—they might not have done well in a standard classroom that only looks at results, but they thrived in the LR. But the students who hadn’t quite bought into “learning for learning’s sake,” but who needed a grade and a degree for economic stability, these students kept pleading, “Just tell me what to do and I can do it.”