Instant Read on Reading, in Palms of Their Hands
Teachers in a rural New Mexico district use hand-held computers to assess students’ reading progress and target instruction accordingly.
Grace, a tiny 3rd grader with long black hair and wide-set eyes, peers over her teacher’s shoulder at the results of the oral-fluency test she’s just finished, which appear on the screen of a hand-held computer as a tiny green triangle up in the right-hand corner.
“So, you read 147 words,” says teacher Laura Wallin of Mountainview Elementary School. She taps the screen and another graph pops up that plots Grace’s reading fluency over time. “At the beginning of the year, you started out at 92 words per minute, then 105. What do you think is helping you the most?”
“When we practice reading to our partners, it helps me,” Grace says, citing times when her partner told her not to skip words as she read out loud. “And it helps me when we have this time to go over it; it helps me know...
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