Research School Network: Looking closely… diagnosing difficulties (part 1)

Fred was finding it hard to learn to read. The entire process simply didn’t seem to make sense to him. Every time he put pen to paper, he made marks, but they rarely represented letters. He would use a book as a prompt for telling his own stories. but rarely looked at the words, or try to use them. Something was amiss. His teacher decided she needed to work what might be the challenge for him. She assembled a bank of diagnostic assessments that would give her a glimpse into how Fred was approaching the task of reading and what he understood about it. The tests, each one a small simple task, helped her build a picture of what Fred knew, what he could do and where the challenges were. One of the first tests she used was a concepts about print test. This short activity is based around reading, a story with the child and asking them a series of questions about how books and texts work. When the teacher asked Fred to show her a letter – he looked blankly at her. He then pointed to the white spaces between two words. She asked him again, on a different page. Once again she asked him ​“show me what we read…” and he pointed to the spaces between the words. He didn’t seem to understand the purpose of letters! It sounds crazy, how can a child fail to realise that, but imagine what would have happened if this teacher had not spent the 10 minutes with Fred to unpick this misconception. Learning to read and write is a complex business. We can’t always assume that children have learnt in the order we would expect them to, or indeed, learn what we thought we are teaching. Having a bank of diagnostic assessments – small tasks that provide a window on a child’s understanding are an essential tool in any teacher’s toolkit.

Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing more blogs on different diagnostic tools we can use to identify the misconceptions and misunderstandings children might have.