1. Think about reading, language arts, and school improvement initiatives you have participated in. How were they initiated? Who were their initial advocates? What were or are the student effects? Are these initiatives still present in your school or district? If "no," why not?
2. Study the Action Research Matrix (Figure 1.1). Think about and discuss why it is organized to move school teams into studying both internal (Cells 1, 3, 4, and 6) and external information (Cells 2 and 5) as they make decisions and take actions.
3. What are your school improvement goals? How were they identified? How is their attainment being supported? How are you studying the status of student performance and their progress in these priority areas in each classroom and across the grades? Create a diagram or chart that shows the support provided for any literacy goal and how student progress is studied for each goal.
4. After you have read the Introduction and Chapter 1, make a list of the actions being taken by Elwood's principal, leadership team, district office staff, intermediate service agency personnel, and faculty. Discuss the rationale for and operation of any you feel are essential in supporting schoolwide improvements in student achievement.
5. Identify and discuss actions that could be employed in your setting.
6. List questions you have about what the Elwood staff is doing and about the action research process. See how many of these you can answer as you continue reading and studying how to improve student performance in reading.

Chapter 2: Building Reading Curriculum Coherence

1. Before reading the chapter, do a quick-write to assess and activate your current knowledge. Here's the prompt: "How coherent is the reading curriculum K–5 (or K–8) in your school and district?"
2. Where did your reading curriculum come from? How was it developed? How was its implementation supported? How are improvements and modifications made and disseminated to the staff?
3. Think about the most literate person you know and enjoy being around. List the actions that led you to identify this person. Using chart paper or a white board, develop a group list. Look at your list and discuss how well your school curriculum supports the development of high literacy from pre-kindergarten on?
4. Look at Figure 2.2. What does the faculty as a unit know about students' levels of development in each dimension? What data sources provide useful instructional information during the year and from year-to-year about student progress? Make a diagram or chart that illustrates what is being used and that makes it easy to see what is missing.

Chapter 3: Clarifying a Few Key Terms

1. Before reading the chapter, define reading, literacy, reading program, assess, and gain. As you read the chapter, note where our definitions overlap and where they do not. As a team, discuss these differences and how they affect instruction and curriculum in the classroom and school.

Part Two: Assessing Student Progress and Reading Program Effects

1. Review Figures II.1 and II.2. Think about the data staff members use in assessing student progress as readers. Think about the data the faculty use in assessing the effectiveness of the reading and literacy program. Are there data sources that need to be explored and utilized to help the faculty make more-informed decisions?
2. Which data sources have been most useful for you personally in monitoring student progress? Why?

Chapter 4: Studying General School Data: Demographics and Program Participation

1. Are gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status factors in predicting whether students who attend your school will become successful readers? What data do you use, or have, that helps answer this question?
2. What percentage of students in your school is served by special needs programs? Are there differences across the grade levels? Across the grades? Recently, scholars (Vellutino & Scanlon, 2001; Torgeson & Mathes, 2000) have reminded us that only 2 to 5 percent of our students have such severe physiological problems that we cannot or may not be successful in teaching them to read. How do these numbers compare to the percentage of students who have severe reading deficiencies in your school?

Chapter 5: Studying Teacher- or School-Assigned Indicators of Student Performance

1. Are you comfortable with how grades are assigned to students' reading performance in your school? Why or why not?

Chapter 6: Studying the Results of Norm-Referenced Tests and Criterion-Referenced Tests

1. Discuss the appropriate use of norm-referenced test (NRT) results. How do these uses match with how these results are used in your school or district?
2. If the results of these tests are being over-emphasized, what are some actions you can take to better educate folks about their uses (including your local education reporter, board members, parents, legislators)? You may want to make a table that contrasts appropriate with inappropriate uses.
3. Working with a partner, select one student, class, and grade level. Create your own example that explains what NRT results mean in terms of reading achievement (similar to what I did on pages 58–69). Provide time for each partnership to present to the group. This provides opportunities for rehearsal and coaching in interpreting and explaining these tests and their results.

Chapter 7: Using Results of Up-Close Performance Measures

1. What up-close measures of reading progress are currently being used in your school? At what grade level? How do teachers use the results and how are these results shared across classes and grade levels?
2. Developing routines for assessing the progress and performance of the student population in these reading dimensions, reflecting on the results, and using the information to strengthen literacy learning opportunities for students is a multi-year endeavor. To have a continuous data stream that produces useful data for classroom teachers and the school community means that time has to be available for organizing and using the data, relating student results to curriculum and instruction, and preparing lessons that move students forward. What routines are in place in your school? If something is missing, what can be done to change the situation?

Chapter 8: Studying Indicators of Reading Habits and Attitudes

1. Interview at least six students. You can do a random sample or just select every fifth male from your class roster and every fifth female until you have six students. Use a form with the following questions and record their responses:
   • Do you think you are a good reader? Why?
   • When you are reading and you come to something you don’t know or don’t understand, what do you do? Do you ever do anything else?
   • What would you like to do better as a reader?
2. Compile the results for your students and compare results across classrooms. Discuss your findings.

Chapter 9: Developing a Reading Assessment System

1. Does your school have a written assessment plan that identifies when across-classroom or across-grade measures will be administered, when the results should be available, when times are scheduled for studying the results, and when time is built into staff development sessions or collaboration meetings to plan interventions and lessons to move students forward in areas of need? If your response is "no," or "sort of," begin to develop one. If you responded to Question 1 in both Part Two and Chapter 7 of this guide, you have part of the information needed as you think through a draft plan. As you work through Chapters 10 through 14, you may continue to fine-tune your plan.

Part Three: Assessing Your Reading Curriculum

1. Create a form that will provide a big-picture summary of how up-close assessments are used to support students' reading development throughout your school or how they could be used. The form should include all of the dimensions of reading and their components. Record the following for each component:
   • Where it is emphasized.
   • When it is assessed.
   • How it is assessed.
   • How often the results are organized.
   • Who used or studied the results.
   • What types of student self-assessment are used.
   Write your current-state information in one color and what you'd like to add in another. Add to or modify as you read and reflect on your current student achievement results and the content provided in the remainder of the book.

Chapter 10: Emergent Literacy

1. Do kindergarten, first grade, and primary grade special needs teachers organize their data on concepts of print, letter recognition, and phonological and phonemic awareness for studying student progress at the individual student level and the classroom level?
   For optimal use of our precious instructional time and resources, tables or templates such as the ones in Figure 7.1 (the Concepts About Print tables) and Figure 10.1 (the tables for phonological and phonemic awareness) are essential tools for grouping students within and across classes and facilitating fast-response interventions. If class summaries of student progress in critical components of reading development are not being used, figure out how to help faculty members become skilled in using these handy tools.

Chapter 11: Reading Vocabulary and Word Analysis Skills

1. As individuals and as a team, conduct a little action research on the size of your classroom libraries and their fiction/nonfiction balance. Use Figure 14.3. What does the quantity and variety picture look like from one team member’s class to the other? Compare your findings to recommendations from the external knowledge base ("at least 500 different books," Allington, 2001, p. 55).
   If you are not content with the number of books accessible to students, brainstorm some immediate changes. Begin to identify ways to build classroom collections that better support students in building vocabulary, applying word analysis skills, and learning from print.
2. As individuals and as a team, conduct a little action research on your use of both explicit instruction and inductive concept formation lessons in teaching word properties (phonetic and structural) and in teaching contextual analysis. Students need both explicit instruction lessons that include explanations, metacognitive modeling, and practice, and inductive lessons that engage them in analyzing words and texts, identifying patterns, forming and testing their hypotheses about these patterns, and applying them as they read and write. If you decide to strengthen your use of explicit instruction, Explaining Reading: A Resource for Teaching Concepts, Skills, and Strategies (Duffy, 2003) is grand. If you decide to strengthen your use of concept formation, my book Teaching Beginning Reading and Writing with the Picture Word Inductive Model (Calhoun, 1999) is a good resource.
3. Interview at least six students about their word-level problem solving strategies. Do they have a set of strategies? What are they? Do they know when and how to effectively seek and use external sources, either printed, computerized, or another person? After you have completed your interview with a student, you may want to give him a passage or book that you think would have a few words beyond his sight vocabulary and listen to him read. When he encounters an unfamiliar word, listen to what he does. Ask him if you are not sure. Ask him the meaning of a few concept words to check his understanding of the vocabulary.
   Discuss your findings. If this sample of students needs more word-level problem-solving strategies in their toolkit, work with colleagues and plan a series of lessons. After an appropriate period, interview your students again.

Chapter 12: Reading Comprehension

1. Using either the list of "Conscious, Less Automatic Processes" in Figure 12.1, "Reading Comprehension: What Proficient Readers Do as They Construct Meaning and Interact with Text" or the list of questions under "Comprehension Processes and Strategies" in Figure 12.3, "A Range of Reading Comprehension Results and Processes for Assessment Consideration," try to describe how you apply these processes as a reader. Note: For many of us, this is a very difficult task, but extremely beneficial in learning how to teach students to read strategically.
2. Are the processes in Figures 12.1 and 12.3 being taught across a variety of texts and grade levels in kindergarten through eighth grade? If you decide that curriculum and instruction need to be strengthened in this area, begin building a set of Think Alouds and explicit instruction lessons on applying these processes to science and social studies content represented in your curriculum. Use high-quality trade books when you can. Maybe even make some videotapes! If you'd like to see some good examples to get you started, read Parts I and II of Duffy's Explaining Reading (2003).

Chapter 13: Reading Habits

1. As individuals and as a team, do a little action research on your students' reading habits. Collect your data weekly. Continue for at least four weeks. Use Tables 27 through 29 or your own similar ones.
2. Based on your research, how many of your students have a good reading habit? What is the average number of books being read by your students and the range? What is the frequency distribution for your class?
3. Compare the results across your group. Do you have some students who are not reading enough to build their vocabulary, to learn from reading, to develop a reading habit? If the response if "yes," work with your colleagues and develop some strategies for improving this picture. Continue collecting data to see if your actions are having the desired effects.

Part Four: Putting It All Together for Sustained Collective Inquiry

Chapter 14: Organizing Schoolwide Action Research and Professional Development

1. Assess your school action plan or staff development plan for the conditions that support collective pursuit of student achievement. Use the list of questions on page 204 to guide your assessment. When you find gaps or actions that need to be moved into place, decide what can be done currently and identify future moves and timetables for action.
2. Look back at your list of questions created from Question 6 in the Chapter 1 section of this study guide. Have you been able to answer all of them? If not, check with your colleagues and continue your inquiry using some of the recommended resources and references.

Using Data to Assess Your Reading Program was written by Emily Calhoun. This 230-page, 8.5" x 11" book (Stock #102268; ISBN 0-87120-968-3) is available from ASCD for $27.95 (ASCD member) or $34.95 (nonmember). Copyright 2004 by ASCD. To order a copy, call ASCD at 1-800-933-2723 (in Virginia 1-703-578-9600) and press 2 for the Service Center. Or buy the book from ASCD's Online Store.