A Needs
Assessment
The 75th Texas Legislature passed House Bill 107 which requires all school
districts in Texas to administer an early reading diagnosis instrument
beginning with the 1998-99 school year for students in grades K-2. The
Texas Education Agency (TEA) became tasked with educating the approximately
40,000 teachers in Texas who work with nearly one million children in
Kindergarten, First Grade and Second Grade. TEA contracted with the Center
for Academic and Reading Skills(CARS) at the University of Texas - Houston(UT-Houston)
to update the Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI) and for assistance
with a massive teacher training effort to fulfill this legislative edict.
The information derived from the TPRI is used to determine which intervention
strategies might be needed for individual students to help them meet the
goal of passing the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test in
third grade.
Presently, teachers are preparing for administering the inventory in
two ways. Teachers can read through the instructions included with the
TPRI packet at home or in conference time at school. In this scenario,
teachers would depend on their own knowledge and what they can gleam from
the booklets and tools in preparing to administer the inventory.
As a second option, teachers can attend a 2-day workshop on how to administer
the TPRI. In the first round of training, some 60 individuals were educated
to work as Education Service Center (ESC) staff throughout the state and
tasked with training the teachers. In the workshops, ESC staff discuss
with attendees the most common errors made in administering TPRI and how
to best prepare for administering. For small school districts and remote
schools, the expense of traveling to a workshop (airfare, hotel, meals,
expenses) may preclude that option. This would place some teachers and
thus, their students, at a disadvantage.
What was learned in first training sessions and in informal interviews
was that teachers preferred ESC workshops over no training at all but
that they required practice with the TPRI tools and wanted to know the
most common "slip up's" for both teacher and students. According
to Dr. Louisa Moats, teachers are familiar with phonics, but most are
unfamiliar with how to teach phonemic awareness, an important step in
learning to read. (Phonemes are sound sets of the English Language. There
are only 26 letters of the alphabet, but there are approximately 40 phonemes
or sounds. It is the blending of phonemes and the ability to add or delete
phonemes from words, that leads to successful reading.)
Although not all schools/districts have selected the TPRI as the way
to fulfill the objectives of House Bill 107, to date over 80% of schools
in Texas have chosen this route. In the present training, the CARS groups
has found that a ratio of 10 to 1 or less is the most successful to properly
train the teachers. Unfortunately, some ESC sessions have as many as 300
teachers to one ESC staff member. This ratio problem must be resolved.
Although teachers felt more prepared to administer the TPRI after workshop
training, with 40,000 teacher, it was a huge undertaking. Thus, some other
sort of training is necessary for educating so many, so quickly.
The Learners
and their Environment
In Spring 1998, 70 teachers were trained by CARS to administer the TPRI
to their students in Kindergarten and First Grade in South Central Houston
Independent School District. These teachers, through a study funded by
the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) found
the TPRI to be "highly relevant" and "easy to administer".
But the study also provided information about four obstacles to proper
administration of the Inventory. According to CARS, those areas are: 1)
teachers tended to guide or give hints instead of just assessing student
answers, 2) properly pronouncing phonological awareness tasks, 3) using
the TPRI results for instruction and future guidance, and 4) efficient
organization of materials.
All four of these problems could be at least partially addressed with
online or compact disc (CD) training. It is believed that all teachers
in all school districts have access to at least one computer with a CD
player and multimedia capability, many have access to more. It is not
true that all teachers have much Internet experience, thus any training
program might have to be accessible via a local CD. The program would
have to load up automatically without installation instructions and would
have to work both Apple/Macintosh computers as well as Intel-based computers.
TEA agreed that mass production of a CD would be an acceptable mode of
delivery of the material and that TEA would handle mass production and
distribution of at least one copy per school. Since it was anticipated
that more than one teacher and administrator per school who would like
to view the information on the CD, the information would also be available
via World Wide Web and accessible to all Texas elementary school districts.
|