Content Details
ED466562 - Methods of Assessing Cognitive Aspects of Early Reading Development
- Category
- Executive Agency Publications
- Collection
- Education Reports from ERIC
- SuDoc Class Number
- ED 1.615:
- Date Issued
- January 1, 2002
- Author
- Wren, Sebastian
- Source Institution
- Southwest Educational Development Lab., Austin, TX
- Sponsoring Agency
- Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC
- Publication Type
- Reports - Descriptive
- Subject
- Beginning Reading, Cognitive Development, Decoding (Reading), Evaluation Methods, Primary Education, Reading Research, Reading Skills, Student Evaluation, Teacher Role
- Identifiers
- Cognitive Domain, Cognitive Frameworks, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory
- Abstract
- To help teachers understand the cognitive development that occurs as children learn to read, the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) has created The Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read: A Framework. It describes the various cognitive domains that research has shown to be necessary for reading acquisition, and also illustrates the interrelationships that exist among these various cognitive domains. In addition to understanding what is important for all children learFting to read, it is also important that teachers understand how to assess individual children's development in each ef the cognitive domains the framewofk describes. To assist teachers in assessing their students' reading development, this paper describes common approaches for assessment for each of the cognitive domains outlined in SEDL's framework of reading acquisition. The paper states that this description of the various assessment techniques can be used to help teachers design their own classroom assessments, and may help teachers to better understand the district or campus assessments already being used with their students. The assessment approaches described in the paper focus on the cognitive development that research has shown to be important for developing early reading skil-ls, but teachers are advised to- use a broader sampie of assessments to inform their instruction. Referring to the framework, the paper begins with the "top three'' elements on-the framewqrk: reading comprehension, decoding, and language comprehension. It then moves to a description of assessments commonly used for the various cognitive domains that support language comprehension (background knowledge, linguistic knowledge, phonology, semantics, and syntax). Finally, it discusses assessment approaches commonly used for the cognitive domains that support decoding (cipher knowledge, lexical knowledge, phoneme awareness, letter knowledge, knowledge of the alphabetic principle, and concepts about print).