A Teacher’s Guide to Standardized Reading Tests: Knowledge Is Power

In recent years, the increasingly high stakes attached to norm-referenced reading tests have made it harder to hold onto what we believe about language arts education. Now, Lucy Calkins, Kate Montgomery, and Donna Santman meet us in the true trenches, offering companionship and guidance in the most lonely, complex, and sometimes heartbreaking area of our teaching: preparing students for standardised reading tests.

A Teacher’s Guide to Standardized Reading Tests reflects the authors’ belief that in order to be less victimised by tests, we need to be more knowledgeable about them. To that end, their book:

provides a complete overview of tests, showing us how to use this information to be more powerful and more articulate participants in today’s political conversations and in our interactions with colleagues, parents, and our students
demonstrates how the methods we’ve come to trust in the reading and writing workshop can be built upon and adapted as we do test-preparation work with our students
rethinks the reading workshop in light of standardised tests, describing predictable challenges children will face when taking tests and ways we can help children develop the capabilities to meet those challenges
provides guidelines for reading and interpreting test results, enabling us to minimise the damage caused by troubling scores.