Education Commons^™

Describing Comprehension, Susan Vander Does

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Teachers' observations of student performance in reading are abundant and insightful but often remain internal and unarticulated. As a result, such observations are an underutilized and undervalued source of data. Given the gaps in knowledge about students’ reading comprehension that exist in formal assessments, the frequent calls for teachers’ observational data to fill these gaps, and the paucity of research on teachers as assessment instruments, this study sought to learn more about the knowledge teachers gain about students’ comprehension through embedded observation.

This research was framed by a transactional conception of reading and informed by cognitive and sociocultural studies of …

More Than Just Nonsense Verse?: The Language Of Dr. Seuss And Children's Literacy, Nicole Hewes

Senior Scholar Papers

In this Senior Scholars project I wanted to demonstrate that Dr. Seuss books are much more than just nonsense verse. For the first part of my project, I familiarized myself with all of his texts and scrutinized his use of language in a textual analysis. By scrutinizing Geisel’s use of language and wordplay, I hoped to isolate some characteristics that make a Seuss book different from other types of stories and texts. The second part of my project was an empirical study that tested what influence reading a real Seuss text versus a fake Seuss text has on students’ performance …

Dialogic Conversations In An Embedded Literacy Assessment Field Experience, Lucy Spence, Amy Donnally, Amy Johnson Lachuk, Marcie Ellerbe

Faculty Publications

Preservice teachers often come into teacher education programs with a positivist view of assessment, which may have developed during their own schooling experiences. For this reason, purposefully constructed course work and field experiences must be offered to enable them reframe their conceptions of literacy assessment and to complicate the assessment practices that have become most familiar to them. This paper examines a course in which, the aim is to intentionally counter the positivist testing culture and invest in helping preservice teachers understand assessment as a multi-faceted, dynamic process of inquiry.