Welcome to PAWS Reading

A Framework for Assessing Reading Skills

"Reading is a purposeful activity. Teachers help students learn to read as a process of gaining meaning from text - and then applying what has been comprehended to complete an activity of some sort. This instructional focus is not surprising because all readers read for a purpose both in and outside of school." Roger Farr, 2003

The Wyoming Language Arts Content and Performance Standards ask students to demonstrate an understanding of literary and informational text. To achieve this end, Wyoming's Performance Standards Level Descriptors ask students to examine texts with accuracy, to make relevant connections, and to support their inferences. These purposes in the Wyoming Language Arts Content and Performance Standards fit meaningfully into Roger Farr's "purposeful reading," an approach to reading assessment designed to be instructionally supportive. While Farr breaks informational texts into functional and expository texts, and labels literary texts as narrative texts, his approach to large-scale assessment of reading is complementary to the Wyoming Language Arts Content and Performance Standards. In order to meet the requirements of an instructionally supportive assessment, Wyoming's framework for assessing reading is based on Roger Farr's "purposeful reading" approach to reading assessment.

PURPOSEFUL READING

Purposes (Skills) for Reading Functional Texts

• Determine information's relevance and importance.
• Select and apply information for a task.

Purposes (Skills) for Reading Expository Texts

• Understand main points and supporting details.
• Recognize expositional organization and its use.
• See relationship of text's content to broader issues/topics.

Purposes (Skills) for Reading Narrative Texts

• Identify the development of basic story elements.
• Understand a story's plot development.
• Identify a story's theme(s) and its (their) development.

Reading Resources

• Lexiles
• Alignment of PAWS to Reading Standard
• Roger Farr

Traffic Signal Instructional Suggestions

• Grade 3
• Grade 4
• Grade 5
• Grade 6
• Grade 7
• Grade 8
• Grade 11

• Grade 3
• Grade 4
• Grade 5
• Grade 6
• Grade 7
• Grade 8
• Grade 11