Articles About STAAR Testing & TEKS Instruction

When students approach text by deciding what they want to do with it and what kind it is, we can show them how to think actively through a text instead of passively reading. Provide graphic organizers to help them track main ideas in the text and use them as references when answering questions.

Teachers can introduce new genres or text features, such as informational, argumentative and narrative, to young readers by making analogies to eating certain foods, including onions, apples and grapefruits. Meanwhile, the scroll bar can help students with consuming texts. 

Dr. Shona discusses the many ways in which students track words when they read.

Dr. Shona explains that, even though it’s better that test questions are now written so that a reader cannot fully succeed without understanding the passage as a whole, we shouldn’t be asking students to read these questions first since we are essentially asking them to fill up their memories before they ever get started reading.

Dr. Shona shares an experiment that will help you and your learners understand and experience what happens when our working memories get full.

The true purpose of online tutorials should be getting students familiar with the tools that will appear on tests, but it won’t work unless they use the tools for a particular purpose. It’s therefore important to become fluent with how the tools aid in their success. Here, Dr. Shona starts with the hide/reveal tool.

Dr. Shona continues her look at how teachers can help their students’ online assessment success by familiarizing themselves with the specific purposes of these assessments’ digital tools through her exploration of the scroll bar and line reader tools.

A metaphor for the difference between online and offline reading reveals that we can’t see what students are having to do to make sense of the text or the test. It’s important to uncover what’s happening under our hard heads as we tackle online reading assessment success. What layers are present in reading online – and cognitively – that we understand and use to intervene? 

Dr. Shona tests the user experience for Cambium to prove how taking a tutorial on any assessment platform is not going to be enough exposure to screen complexities to help eliminate the challenges of online assessments for young student readers.

What should digital reading for students look like now? Part of the answer can be found by looking at what changed when the printed word switched to pixels on screens.