In the past my district has been fairly lax when it comes to giving DRAs. Most teachers gave the DRA sometime in the fall and again near the end of the school year in grades K-3. Between those times if we wanted another snapshot we'd assess with a shorter program like the Rigby. Our Title I teachers always offered to assess students brand new to our school since we often don't have any information to go off of and it can take a few tries to get their level. Along with new students the Title I teachers also assessed students they had worked with previously. I teach the inclusion class for my grade and our Intervention Specialists always assessed my students on IEPs for reading. This meant that I probably gave an average of 17 DRAs in the fall out of a class of 25 (on average). Last spring we were trained on the DRA2 which seems to give a more accurate picture, but is also a bit more difficult and we're anticipating many of our students will drop levels from last year. We've been directed to start students 1-2 levels lower than they were assessed at with the original DRA. In order to be consistent, all students must be assessed by their homeroom teacher (so no more getting help from Title I or IS). We also had a shift in our boundary lines so many of our students are new to our school this year, if not our district and I'm having quite a bit of difficulty trying to track down reading information for 8 of my students. Oh, and the kicker is that we're required to have all of our students assessed using the DRA2 by September 20th. School just started last week and I've feverishly tried to help my students gain independence so that I'll be able to begin assessing this week. We're not being provided substitutes but our Title I teacher is trying to help by taking over our classes for 45 min. a day each day for the next week or so. I guess I'm wondering what other districts/schools expect and how you manage to get it all done.
We use DRA2. We are asked to do 4 throughout the year, the first one in within the first month of school. It is a lot, especially since asking the rest of my kids to work independently while I'm giving the DRAs can be really tough. Honestly, I usually go in another area to give them while I have my paras try to manage the rest of them in centers.
We were giving them twice a year, but abandoned the test when several different university studies showed the DRA2 useless for tracking student progress or planning instruction. Also they took 45-75 minutes for each student and that loss of instructional time was deemed to be on the verge of catastrophic especially when you consider the results are fairly useless.
Sigh. In theory, it seems like a great system. I used a similar running record sort of program when I tutored in college and felt it really gave me a good picture of those students. However, I only had 1-2 at a time. Today I managed to test one student, though I had to bump him down a level which took some time. I'm hoping to get at least 2 accomplished tomorrow. At this point, I'm of the mindset that I'll do the best I can to meet the September 20th deadline, but I won't beat myself up over it. Sure, I could have my students SSR for the entire afternoon, but I don't feel that'd be doing my job as a teacher. As it is, I'll keep plugging along.
For your principal. Here's the link to the academic review of the DRA assessment. If you want some change in your school, you could share the review with this sentence on page 17 highlighted: DRA users cannot be confident that students will obtain the same reading levels with different teachers, on different occasions, and on different texts within the same level, or that the obtained performance levels are accurate reflections of students’ actual levels of reading proficiency. Consequently, the use of the DRA for summative assessment or individual programming purposes cannot be recommended http://www.natalierathvon.com/images/DRA_Review-08-25-2006.pdf
