Chapter 4 Informal Assessment: Progress monitoring

As the assessment continuum as the chapter refers it to listed several types of reliability and validity assessments. I was intrigued with all the different types and the formalities of each of them. Between the consistency, raters, consistency among items, parallel or equivalent administration, content validity, construct validity, concurrent validity and predictive validity. So many explanations and on some of them I had no clue what it was about. (OK I am being honest). As a Kindergarten teacher I am familiar with DIBELS. I never administered it because I am a bilingual teacher and it was only done with the English teachers and I could hear the grips every time that they had to do it. I never quite understood why DIBELS in English and nothing in Spanish but when I left Kindergarten the assessment was IDEL for bilingual students and two years later it became Progress Monitoring. I understand that as teachers we have to do assessments and that is part of the job but in my own opinion I think it goes overboard (but that is my personal opinion). I knot that there are benchmarks that we all have to follow and the expectations are there. I have heard about the BRIGANCE assessment with Special Education. I have no clue on what it has and what the expectations are with Sp. Ed students and teachers. The goal of all these types of assessments help us identify children at risk for reading failure and I understand what is behind it but I still think it is to much.