Shane Templeton, Educational Specialties professor, Donald Bear, professor and director of the E.L. Cord Foundation Center for Learning and Literacy, and Saundra Madura, who now teaches fifth grade at Florence Drake Elementary School in Sparks, have published the invited chapter "Assessing students' spelling knowledge: Relationships to reading and writing," in Classroom literacy assessment: Making Sense of what Students Know and Do (New York: Guilford Press, 2007).
The book has won rave reviews:
Timothy Shanahan, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago writes:
"What a wonderful book! Paratore and McCormack have assembled a collection of 'must-read' chapters that hone in on best practices in classroom literacy assessment, cutting through the fog of testing mandates and poor practice with the clarifying intensity of a laser."
"These pages are packed with checklists, vignettes, exemplars, rubrics, insights, good ideas, and helpful findings. Readers may not agree with everything they read here, but it's hard to find a page that doesn't help one to better make sense of children's learning. This is definitely the smart teachers' guide to literacy assessment."
Mary E. Matthews, Curriculum Coordinator for K-8 Language Arts, Brookline (Massachusetts) Public Schools writes:
"The most comprehensive and thorough examination of classroom-based literacy assessment that I have seen. The contributors provide a necessary balance between research and best practice, identifying and clarifying the principles of effective assessment with the goal of improving teaching and learning."
This book is particularly timely, as teachers nationwide are faced with preparing their students each year for mandated, external, and high-stakes testing. Classroom Literacy Assessment clearly places assessment back in the hands of teachers and their students."
"It should be read and discussed by teachers, specialists, and administrators in preschool through middle school to revisit the purpose of assessment and its relation to meaningful learning. It would serve well as a core text in any course on effective literacy assessment."