At the bottom line, when you administer Benchmark Assessment, you are engaging in research. It is important in the process of research to have reliability. In other words, every teacher in your school needs to evaluate comprehension using the same precise criteria. If that is not the case, some teachers will accept superficial responses, while others will apply more rigorous criteria. We need to be rigorous. Otherwise, we will overestimate our students' ability to understand texts, and we will not provide the instruction required.
If students are not deeply understanding the texts, we need to know that, and we need to help them. Assessment should provide this information to help teachers. We felt that teachers needed more guidance on how to conduct the comprehension conversation portion of the reading record. We cannot take for granted students' ability to deeply comprehend texts. It is not enough to read accurately with minimal literal comprehension.
Students are expected to think deeply about texts. To provide this help, we have more clearly defined this process through the creation of a new rubric and have updated the scoring criteria. As a result, there will be more consistency and accuracy in scoring this portion of the assessment. Elimination of the extra point will bring greater consistency of scoring among teachers.
