Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are
joining together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas
about supporting young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading
teacher/coach in Long Beach, California, is helping moderate the
discussion. Juli is also keeping a weekly journal of her own Reading
Workshop initiative. Find out more about our project at our Reading Workshop homepage. You'll find
Juli's background article here. Links
to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file
will begin to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
Juli Kendall is posting this inference rubric in the hope
that it will prove useful to middle grades teachers looking for
a tool to assess inference skills across the curriculum. Here's
her explanation.
I made the decision very early on in the writing of the my journals
to focus on reading (book selection, reading aloud, running records,
shared reading, guided reading, just right books, talking about
books, thinking aloud about books, etc.) rather than writing and
the writing response.
Therefore, I have not covered Reading Logs, Reading Journals,
or Reading Notebooks, although I have always used them with my
students. I felt that middle grades teachers have much more background
in writing, and this Workshop project could allow us to cover
less familiar territory -- talking about reading to build understandings.
I did decide to devote a section of Reading Workshop to content
area reading since it is so important in middle school. And since
I am teaching in elementary this year, I can so clearly see that
teachers are not always teaching kids "how to do it."
As I was working on my journal about content
area reading, I went back through all my middle school material
and found my rubric on inference. I have used it only a little
this year -- just enough to see that my kids (who are really repeating
fifth grade) are not using much inference in their writing responses
yet. I hope some of my readers will find this rubric useful, and
perhaps it will spark some curiosity and conversation on our List.
Background about the inference rubric
The Inference Rubric came about because of the collaboration on
reading in all content areas at Hill Middle School, where I taught
for quite a few years. I worked as the Literacy Standards Coach
for reading and developed a rubric for each of our focus areas.
My team would try out the rubrics and give me feedback about their
experiences. Then I would take all the suggestions from the different
content areas and try to weave it into a working rubric.
The Inference rubric was always a challenge. The idea was that
students would have reading response logs in all content areas
and that they would use them to write a response to their reading
for math, art, science, history, PE, literature, music, etc. Then
the challenge became "how can we know that they are using
the strategies we are teaching?" Thus, the rubric.
It was meant to be something that could be used across content
areas to evaluate a student's response to see what level of inference
was involved after inference had been taught. It could be in response
to a prompt or just an open invitation to write.
This opportunity to respond to reading by writing is important
in content area reading. But then, how do we evaluate it? After
reading lots of journals, these were the three qualities of inferring
from text that stood out.
-- Thoughtful predictions, interpretations, and/or conclusions about the text with depth and understanding
-- Meanings, clues, and details that are not explicitly stated (inferred)
-- Connections between the text and the reader,s background knowledge (schema) or ideas and beliefs
The rubric made it possible for teachers to talk about student's
work in responding to reading across content areas. A science
teacher would give a 3 to a written response in science, a math
teacher would give a 4 for one in math and they could have a conversation
about the level of inference the student was using and not have
to deal so much with the "assignment" issue. It made
for some interesting Looking at Student Work discussions.
In 2001, our entire school (Hill) focused on just one strategy
-- using Inference to understand what you read. The rubric proved
to be a useful tool for us. I hope you find good uses for it,
too.