Belief Statements or Assumptions For Literature (pre assessment)

When you begin to define or describe a subject or any part of a curriculum it is good to reflect on your beliefs or assumptions that underlay and will undoutable influence the decision making process. The following list can inclueds ideas to explore and identify your beliefs or assumptions about literature.

Read each statement and respond according to the scale -
| 0 none - totally disagree | 1 disagree | 2 neutral | 3 agree | 4 yes - totally agree |

Agreement		Belief or Assumption
	1.	We must continually account for the students affective/ emotional response to literature and strive to make it positive for a variety of different types of literature, genre, and story elements.
	2.	Children’s literature is essential for the development of an educated citizenry. Therefore, literature must be included in the planned, enacted, and experienced curriculum.
	3.	Children’s literature has undergone significant changes over the years and is still evolving with significant changes happening now and unimaginable changes in the not too distant future.
	4.	There are many sources to help locate children's books, authors, activities, literature selection aids, and literature review sources.
	5.	Research related to children's literature is helpful to teachers.
	6.	There are multiple forms of literature that can be used to teach literacy in the classroom.
	7.	Instructional techniques, to achieve success, must include a variety of channels of communication in all media, integration with all aspects of the students' lives, and literature from a variety of genre inclusive or local and global cultures. Studied in a manner that allows students to have significant intellectual and emotional transactions with this variety of literature in a manner that develops their self-efficacy and appreciation of literature.
	8.	It’s important for students to understand the human side of artists, authors, composers, poets, producers, actors, actresses, musicians, playwrights, and illustrators of children's literature.
	9.	Students’ can learn to appreciate literature and different literary genre.
	10.	Students can understand and critically analyze children's literature and its literary elements.
	11.	Assessment helps us understand how to help students understand, use, and enjoy literature.
	12.	Evaluation is personal and should be each individuals responsibility
	13.	Literacy is more than understanding and having skill in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and creating and interpreting graphic representations.
	14.	Today's students are more prone to being literate in pop culture: TV, movies, music, videos, electronic games, and the use of electronic audio and video equipment and advertising. As teachers we can and must use the background students have in different types of literature for understanding those and elements within those pieces of literature and use it to facilitate their learning and guide them to literacy in all media particularly those dependent on text to tell a story.
	15.	Oral literacy is related to only primitive civilizations and cultures.
	16.	Literacy is text based.
	17.	Literacy consists of the three separate skills: decoding, word attack, and comprehension.
	18.	Practices that children participate in are the ones they acquire.
	19.	Widespread literacy has positive economic consequences.
	20.	People construct identities based on current identities and their belief of their future possibilities.
	21.	There is a difference in reading a passage to find an answer on a test and reading to find out how this years team will be.
	22.	If a person fluently reads something out load, then they are accurate readers.
	23.	Students should engage in literature without the purpose of making meaning.
	24.	The purpose for reading in schools is to complete exercises.
	25.	The purpose for reading in schools is for students to practice being submissive.
	26.	The passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has exacerbated 'worst practice' in a majority of classrooms.
	27.	Literacy instruction that actively subverts NCLB by refusing to include low-level skill instruction, exercises and worksheets, is more risky for teachers than it is for students.
	28.	Multiliteracies are based on print.
	29.	Any use of print counts as reading
	30.	No print use is comparable to another.
	31.	Standardized assessment based curriculum pedagogy promotes coercive relationships.
	32.	Vocabulary growth can represent the totality of the curriculum.
	33.	It is difficult to acquire skill with instructional nonsense in any language, but it is easier in one's first language.
	34.	It is difficult to acquire skill with instructional nonsense through literacy exercises alone; that is, regardless of language of instruction, if children's experience with literacy is primarily through texts written for instruction, they will have difficulty becoming skilled in instructional nonsense.
	35.	It is difficult to become literate through instructional nonsense. Corollary: Test scores of children who have been fed a restricted diet of reading exercises will result in some "false positives"—children who develop skill with some exercises but who have meager abilities with genuine texts-in-the-world.
	36.	Interpersonal oral communicative activity plays a significant role in learning to use written language.
	37.	It is easy to learn to read and write in school when the school emphasizes reading and writing, not reading and writing exercises.
	38.	When students have learned to read and write, they can more easily learn instructional nonsense if that is necessary for some narrow instrumental purpose. Corollary: Test scores may reflect "false negatives"—test performances that under represent how well students can read and write for their own purposes.
	39.	We can learn how people read the advice column in the newspaper by how they read reading exercises in a classroom.
	40.	Regular reading and writing in a classroom is connected to real life reading and writing is more presumed than suggested by research.
	41.	Literacy always brings with it social and individual gains and illiteracy cause ills as varied as poverty and alcoholism.
	42.	An evolved genetic capacity can help explain language acquisition and commonalities across languages.
	43.	Schooling should include print use with no meaning-making, exercises in reading, reading for submission.
	44.	If federal policy were actually intent upon shrinking the test score gap, it would provide social and economic benefits that give people material security and that encourage agency and hope.
	45.	Neo liberalism is focused on free market capitalism as an ethic to guide all human activity. It makes the market an end in itself.