Teach Primary 18.8
knowledge – that is to say, inferring more meanings than a reader who was not already familiar with them. In this regard, the SATs reading comprehension test is what E. D. Hirsch describes as a ‘knowledge test in disguise’. Of course, pupils had three such texts to grapple with, and so the SATs become a demanding test of fluent and knowledgeable reading. Over 2,000 words, across the reading assessment, need to be cohered quickly into meaningful understanding; those schemas matter. Time for a change? No assessment is perfect – and the KS2 SATs reading test certainly isn’t. So, we should replace it with something better, right? There has been a call to change the SATs assessment into a reading test where the topic of what is being read is already known and pre-taught in the curriculum. For example, schools could be told that pupils will be tested using texts about the Amazon rainforest. This could create some equity for those pupils who don’t possess the background knowledge of words and the world, accumulated via lots of prior reading and learning. However, doing this would shift the nature of the assessment to being one more squarely testing teachers’ ability to teach a reading curriculum successfully, rather than children’s T he first text for children to read in the 23/24 KS2 SATs reading assessment was an informational one, entitled ‘Streaky and Squeaky’. It discussed the wildlife of Madagascar, focusing in particular on the streak tenrec. Like many informational texts, it presented a unique topic, unlikely to have been directly taught in the primary school curriculum. This approach is common in general reading comprehension assessments. It seeks to assess a valid, generalised reading ability, separate from expectations of what has been explicitly taught in the national curriculum. Along with tier 3 vocab ( deforestation, population ), the streaked tenrec text combined tricky academic language ( soft-bodied invertebrates, stridulation) with more age-appropriate ‘book language’ ( confused hodgepodge, marvellous streakiness ). Additional text features were also included to guide the reader. An unlevel playing field Stronger readers would likely have encountered more tier 3 words in the curriculum than their less able peers, along with other rich language experiences. As a result, those readers should have been better able to link them together into rich schemas of reading ability and knowledge of the English language. It doesn’t take too big a mental leap to see schools narrowing the curriculum to hot house those topics announced for the SATs. A term of Year 6 (then 5, then 4…) could become devoted to 60 | www.teachwire.net A TENREC? Have you ever met Alex Quigley breaks down the latest KS2 reading assessments and wonders if there’s a better way... learning everything about the Amazon – with pupils mired in endless SATs-style mini-texts. The risk of any shift that privileges a knowledge-rich reading curriculum, is a curriculum narrowed by expediency. A yet more radical
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