Sunday, February 12, 2012

How to Assess Students with Reading Difficulty


As a science teacher, my primary goal is to arouse students’ interest in science and teach them as much science as I can. Test is a tool to help teachers know how much knowledge students have grasped. Test is good tool if it reflects students’ real understanding of the material. If test fail to reflect, it will be the time to redesign the test. Because teachers are measuring students’ science abilities, and test is just a tool to serve this purpose.

Reading is the media conveying the material to assess students; thus if students have difficulty reading, I will seek out another effective media to convey the test ideas. I can conduct oral tests, or performance-based tests, which can involve students in the laboratory work. After all, reading should not be an obstacle in the way of students’ science learning.

If my student physically has difficulty reading, I will help find out the most appropriate assistive technologies for him/her. For example, if the student is visually impaired, I will give him/her a PDF copy of the reading material, so that the computer can read out the material to the student using certain text-to-speech software. Furthermore, I will strictly follow the 9 principles of Universal Design for Instruction in my teaching plans and tests, in order to ensure instructions are readily accessible to every student.

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