Assessment can have a signifi cant impact on children's learning to read. In the absence of assessment, you really don't know whether children are making the kind of progress they need to make. You assess for different purposes. Progress-monitoring, classroom-based assessment should provide you with an indicator of how children are doing and as a result provide an indicator of how you are teaching. It also provides an indicator of how the program is supporting teachers and ensuring that the right skills are being taught at the right time. Ongoing assessment is absolutely critical to ensuring that all children learn to read. We need ongoing progress-monitoring assessment to ensure that the instruction is adequate and effective. If it's not, we need to make an adjustment to instruction.

Think about the four purposes of assessment.

1. Screening assessment helps you identify children early on so they can get the support they need. You identify children early in kindergarten, early in fi rst grade, second grade, and third grade. The intent is to identify children in a way that gives you information about what skills and experiences they need in reading.

2. Ongoing progress monitoring ensures that the instruction you're providing is the most effective instruction for children. Instead of waiting until the end of the year and fi nding out whether it's the most effective instruction, we want to take samples of children's behavior at different points in time. This gives us a sense of whether children are making the kind of progress they should be making. If it's a good progress-monitoring assessment system, it will give you benchmarks at different points in time that will tell you where children ought to be. Progress monitoring is a very critical piece of a sound reading program. It's a new genre of assessment. It's critical and it should provide information to teachers about what kind of adjustments to make in their instruction.

3. Outcome assessment has to do with end-of-year assessment. It's typically a norm reference—standardized reading tests and achievement tests—that tells teachers, administrators, parents, and boards of education where children are and how they've done through an entire year of reading instruction. These are the assessments we're typically familiar with in classrooms.

4. Diagnosis is the fourth purpose of assessment. This is when you've identifi ed that a child has a problem but you want more information. You want to go deeper with respect to what that child knows. The child may have some idea of how to grab at sounds, how to grab the auditory signal, and work with that signal, but it's clear that the child doesn't have a very good understanding of how to do that. Diagnostic assessment can go deeper on a particular skill.

There are four types of assessments in reading that are important. I would place my emphasis on screening early, identifying children early who need more support, and on progress monitoring to ensure that children are making progress along the way so that we can get those outcomes at the end of the year.

They're critical because you get assessment data for purposes of decision making. When you talk about assessment, all you're doing is taking a sample of a child's behavior at a particular point in time. The more samples, the more reliable it is, and, hopefully, it's a valid sample of the child's reading behavior and experiences with reading. The outcome assessment is the high-stakes assessment, because it tells teachers and administrators whether a child has made the kind of grade-level progress he or she should make. At the end of the year, is a third-grade reader going to move from third grade to fourth grade? Will he or she be positioned with the experiences, knowledge, and skills that are necessary to be successful in fourth grade? That, to me, is an outcome assessment that tells us whether we've reached certain kinds of benchmarks at the end of the year. Outcome assessments are very important for AYP, but progress-monitoring assessment is also critical because it tells us whether we have to make adjustments in the kind of instruction we're providing.

There's nothing wrong with teaching to the state standards. In fact, we don't really have a choice but to teach to the state standards. The standards represent some benchmarks. They represent critical experiences we think are important. One of the issues we have to decide is what the priorities are in terms of those standards. Are we focusing on the right standards at the right grade level at the right points in time? And how do schools move children from a point of not being able to meet the standards to a point where they are able to meet the standards? It's kind of going from partial knowing to more complete knowing about reading and those reading experiences.

Yes, I'm very excited about Scott Foresman Reading Street because it takes assessment and progress monitoring very seriously. We have enough data to know that children ought to be making progress along the way. We have data that tell us how much progress they should be making in kindergarten, on what skills at what points in time, and the kind of increments they should be gaining at different points in time. We have that information in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade. To me, it's absolutely a critical piece of a solid, scientifi cally based reading program.