Assessments

Hinchman Chapter 19:
Assessments in the secondary classroom extend far beyond gauging basic comprehension. Assessment data should lead teachers to improve and support student learning and should lead students to self-reflect on their own learning. Assessments are also cumulative results of previous years of schooling, so teachers must meet students where they are and provide supports and challenges to foster growth. 
Literacy development is a nonstop process that extends into adulthood, and it is ever-changing. Foci change as new perspectives and conditions emerge to address changing literacies and modalities. To address the diverse needs of adolescent readers, especially struggling readers, RTIs are typically used in some form or another.
Content-Area Reading Inventory (CARI): 
CARI assesses reading, thinking, and study processes of students in content area texts, and its results are used to create more individualized lessons for students. CARI is teacher-made and should reveal potential issues students will have with a text as well as skills and strategies students will need in order to effectively utilize the text. CARI development consists of three steps: 1) identify essential skills (reading, writing, and thinking) needed to competently manipulate a text as well as produce an outcome; 2) select excerpt from the text that is complete in itself; 3) design 3-5 guiding questions and prompts to help students navigate through the text. CARI can focus on book parts, understanding visual information, understanding content vocabulary, determining and summarizing key ideas, and creating study reading aids. 
Once students complete their CARI, teachers tally the results, they can tailor their instruction to fit individual needs through whole-class, small-group, or individual instruction.
Vocabulary Self-Awareness:
Vocabulary knowledge should be assessed prior to reading so deficiencies in needed academic vocabulary can be addressed. This is done through a Vocabulary Self-Awareness chart that lists key terms from the lesson. Students should use + or √ or - to indicate their level of knowledge and familiarity with each term and should write self-created definitions for words they mark with + or √. As the lesson progresses, students should be revising their charts to indicate a growing level of knowledge and familiarity, and teachers can monitor progress and offer additional support to students who are struggling.
Assessing Competencies with Academic Concepts Through Youth Media:
To help students become more successful, there should be a seamless transition between out-of-school texts and classroom practices. These out-of-school texts include everything from comic books and fan fiction to video games and music. Teachers can channel these outside interests to create connections between them and concepts and strategies being taught in class and to promote multimodal output.

Afflerbach: 
Three Important Questions for the Assessment of Adolescent Reading:
1) Why? (establishes goal) 2) What? (connects what is taught with what is assessed) 3) How? (establishes type of assessment)
Defining Reading:
PISA's definition of reading ("understanding, using, and reflecting on written texts, in order to achieve one's goal, to develop one's knowledge and potential, and to participate in society") should be expanded to incorporate expected outcomes as well as the skills used while reading including fluency, decoding, vocabulary development, and comprehension. As students advance in school, the size and complexity of content area texts increases, so students must self-monitor and continue to develop content-specific strategies to help them be successful in describing, comparing, synthesizing, and evaluating what they read. There are two balances that must be met to ensure adequate literacy growth in students. One is between reading development and content learning, and the other is between summative and formative assessments.
Successful Assessment of Reading:
Cognition (strategies students use when they read/content they are expected to learn), observation (deepening knowledge of content-area concepts and reading), and interpretation (inferences drawn from assessment results) are all vital to the creation, implementation, and interpretation of assessments in the content area. Assessments must encourage and promote high levels of reading achievement and motivation as well as the creation of engaging curriculums.
Determining the Suitability of Reading Assessments:
CURRV framework helps evaluate reading assessments by examining its consequences, its usefulness, the roles and responsibilities related to it, and its reliability and validity.
Types of Assessments for Adolescent Reading:
-Performance Assessments: Complex tasks are required to gauge students' ability to use what they have learned. These tasks include: comparing and contrasting, accounting for differences, writing creatively or persuasively to synthesize information, or creating an artistic output. Performance assessments have rubrics to clearly communicate performance level expectations and to provide students a blueprint to an advanced level of work. Performance assessments to do provide information on the development of reading skills, and they lend themselves to be graded subjectively and consistently.
-Portfolio Assessments: Thinking and reflection are at the core of portfolio assessments. Portfolios come in many forms but are flexible so as to allow adjustments for audience and purpose, and they allow students to see their growth and development. Students should reflect on the work in their portfolio through self-assessments and discussions with teachers and parents.
-Teacher Observation and Questioning: At its most basic, questioning involves answering comprehensions questions at the end of a reading. However, it should be expanded to include questions not only about content and reading skills and strategies development but also questions that model how students should be thinking on their own. Allowing students to think aloud can produce a fluid assessment of knowledge. 
-High Stakes Testing: Very little valid, usable information can be gleaned from the results of state testing because students become apathetic and complacent when testing and because so much time passes between the administration and the score reporting.
What We Need to Know Next:
Assessments must move past multiple choice and short answer and become a more holistic representation of content knowledge and literacy growth. Professional development and trainings are needed to help teachers understand the characteristics of effective assessments as well as how to create them.

Text-to-Text: Most texts I've read regarding assessments have pushed the use of assessments that extend past multiple choice and short answer as they do not help students engage the content knowledge they learned by manipulating and applying it in different ways.
Text-to-Self: I don't retain information for any significant length of time when I know the test is multiple choice. I remember it long enough to take the assessment, and then it's lost and takes a lot of relearning and patience to find it again.
Text-to-World: Being able to analyze and manipulate and apply new knowledge is an invaluable tool. We unconsciously use it throughout our day during tasks like driving. We need to teach students the importance of being able to synthesize information and extend themselves so that they'll be more productive citizens.

Questions:
1) What assessments do you use that demand higher-level thinking and produce useful data but that the students enjoy completing?
2) What do you use to create your assessments? Do you collaborate with other teachers, or do you typically create your own?