Assessment - HELP for Informal Assessment

According to Cruz (year, p. 91), HELP is an informal assessment tool for adults founded on the premises of the whole language approach to learning. The eight-step HELP process allows one to evaluate almost twenty different types of literacy skills in four categories. Thoroughly described in Cruz (year), the diagnostic is outlined only briefly here.

Literacy Skills Evaluated

Thinking Skills

• abstract reasoning
• problem solving
• strategy learning
• building internal and external connections
• critical reflection
• attention span (working memory)
• sequencing ideas and concepts

Oral Communication Skills

• reception (perception, comprehension, memory)
• expression (retrieval, vocabulary rule usage, pronunciation, sequencing ideas and concepts)

Reading Skills

• auditory language (saying the words subvocally)
• verbal processing
• context association
• comprehension and content analysis
• spelling (decoding and phonics analysis)

Written Language

• composition
• sentence construction
• revision
• self-monitoring
• organization
• handwriting
• punctuation
• capitalization

Help Steps and Tasks

The student reads aloud into a tape recorder.

• The passage of text chosen can be from any source (at an appropriate level of difficulty) as long as the student has not read it before.
• To successfully complete this task, the student must have adequate oral communication and reading skills.
• This step helps to evaluate the student's ability to read fluently and to comprehend the text. Problems with the former are indicated by inability to sound out words, mispronunciation, and skipping words or lines. Problems with the latter are indicated by inability to make inferences, use prior knowledge, and use contextual clues.

The student listens to the recording using earphones.

• Oral communication skills, listening skills in particular, are evaluated at this stage.
• Poor listening skills are indicated by inability to retain spoken information, lack of comprehension, and inability to distinguish similar words.

The student listens again to the recording and takes notes.

• Step three has the student listening to the recording again through earphones and taking notes in the Cornell or two-column format.
• This task calls on a variety of thinking, oral communication, and written language skills.
• Note taking problems include inability to identify main points and supporting details as well as poor writing.

The student highlights the main points in the notes.

• Thinking, reading, and written language skills are evaluated at this stage.
• One may evaluate whether or not students can identify main points, identify relationships among information, and relate new information to prior knowledge.
• Deficiencies are indicated by resistance to the task, inadequate notes for completing the task, and overusing the highlighter.

The student develops some kind of organizer for the main points.

• Abstract reasoning skills are called upon to complete this task.
• Examples of organizers are flow charts, spider maps, and matrices.
• Targeted skills at this stage are thinking, oral communication, reading, and written language.
• Organizational deficiencies are indicated by inability to prioritize tasks or information, to describe the organizers, or to understand the task at all.

The student writes a summary using the organizer.

• This task helps to evaluate thinking, reading, and written language skills by asking the student to write a short summary based on the information in the organizer.
• It measures the student's ability to synthesize information in writing and to monitor his/her performance.
• Spelling errors, poor grammar, poor organization and sentence structure, and anxiety are indicators of summarizing problems.

The student edits and revises the summary.

• Reading and written language skills are required for this task.
• The task measures the student's ability to synthesize information in writing and to monitor his/her performance.
• Difficulty discussing the summary content and structure, using a dictionary, identifying errors, and using grammatically correct sentences are indicators of revising problems.

The student reflects on the summary and develops conclusions.

• Three groups of skills are evaluated at this stage: thinking, oral communication, and reading.
• The student is asked to make judgments about the passage of text, to anticipate next steps, and to identify implications.
• Deficiencies in abstract reasoning are indicated by anxiety about the task, lack of understanding of cause-effect relationships, and difficulty in verbal expression of conclusions