Checking Students' ORAs

Abstract

Online technology tools eliminate the need for teachers to bend to the strictures of traditional essays during assessments. Inspired by a shift in teaching and assessment needs during the pandemic, the authors experimented with requiring students to submit oral responses to novel studies in their high school English classrooms. The benefits of the digital oral reading assessment persist even as pandemic learning restrictions loosen, and the authors have since incorporated oral reading assessments into their classrooms as a matter of routine. Recommendations are provided in structuring prompts, creating rubrics, and collecting filmed responses, and solutions are offered to the problems of teacher time constraints, student testing anxiety, and the relative ease of student plagiarism. The authors provide the reader with three oral reading assessment prompts for texts of literary merit, including Octavia Butler's Kindred, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and James McBride's The Color of Water, along with rubrics that can be adapted for use with any novel.