Synopses & Reviews
The first edition of An
Observation Survey has been used in educational systems worldwide. It has introduced thousands of teachers to ways of observing children's progress in the early years of learning about literacy. It has also helped them determine which children need supplementary teaching.
Thoroughly revised and updated, this second edition includes several new features:
- Theoretical discussions are reflected in a careful balance between reading and writing processes, in the ways each task is introduced, and in new examples of children's responses and teachers' record keeping.
- Consistency with the accompanying video makes administration of the Observation Survey easier and more effective.
- New stanine tables relate to today's children. Tables for four groups start at age five. Ohio stanines are provided for Fall, mid-year, and Spring assessing.
- Half-yearly assessments allow more rapid identification of children whose progress is falling behind their classmates.
- Appendixes feature more technical details of the statistical characteristics of the subtasks and the Survey and include correlations of the tasks, one with another. Graphs and box plots show how surges of progress occur at different times on different tasks.
- A new separate booklet of Copymasters provides official recording forms and summary sheets to administer the Survey.
The new second edition requires no retraining, but offers teachers the opportunity to refresh their understanding of standard assessment practices. The Survey is indispensable for teachers who work individually with children having temporary difficulties with literacy learning. It also allows teachers to give administrators an easy-to-understand account of an individual child's progress between two points in time. And for students of emerging literacy behaviors, observation procedures like these are essential to training.
Also available: An Observation Survey: The Video.
Synopsis
This book provides for the systematic observation of young children's responses to classroom reading and writing in the first years of school.
About the Author
Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon),Emeritus Professor, taught in primary schools and then at the University of Auckland where, for the next 30 years she introduced educational psychologists to ways of preventing psychological problems. She did post-graduate study in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis entitled "Emergent Literacy." Her 'Reading (and writing) Recovery' is an early literacy intervention, which is now implemented in five countries, and three languages. Literacy Lessons Designed For Individuals integrates what has been learned from that innovation with new research and theoretical advocacies. Shifts in early literacy learning can be monitored by teachers using her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish and French. A series of individual lessons can be delivered in those languages to about 150,000 children worldwide annually using a guidebook called Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals is a similar guidebook which aims to make accelerated progress possible for a wider range of problems. Marie Clay was past-President of the International Reading Association, served on the editorial committees of professional journals, was a research consultant at home and abroad including UNESCO, chaired a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked internationally with problem-solving related to early intervention research and practice.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Observing Change in Early Literacy Behaviors
Reading and Writing: Processing the Information in Print
Assisting Young Children Making Slow Progress
Concepts About Print
Taking Records of Reading Continuous Texts
Observation Tasks for Letter Identification, Word Reading, Writing Vocabulary, and Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words
Summarizing the Observation Survey Results
The Teacher and the Observations
Appendixes:
New Zealand Norms for the Observation Survey
Historical Notes on An Observation Survey
Ohio Word Test and Duncan Word Test Administration and Score Sheets