Moving from Assessment to Instruction

Moving from Assessment to Instruction                                                                                              

Needs, ability and interests of student:

The student loves football and cars, sports cars such as Ferraris’ and Lamborghinis in particular. He enjoys reading material that he picks out and has previous knowledge for. He did not seem engaged with the Amelia Earhart piece as he had no concept of who she was and her importance.  This student needs to have previous knowledge or discussion to happen before reading the piece, this would increase his comprehension. He is thoughtful and does care but not when he cannot make connections due to lack of previous knowledge or interesting facts about the person.  The student’s favorite activity at this point is spelling. He wants to spell words right and wants feedback on how he is doing in this area. He is easily distracted if he does not care about what he is working on therefore, it is essential that reading be engaging and interesting to him to help retain his focus. The student still misses his best friend who moved away and often includes this particular friend in his writing.  The student is doing better now and seems to be better adjusted to his friend’s departure from his class/school . The student likes to talk about sports events and tricky things that players do in basketball such as spinning the basketball on their finger.  He likes to tell stories especially personal stories of close calls with safety such as adventures with 4^th of July and so forth.

Word identification in isolation (accuracy and strategies)

The student has one miscue where he mistakes cared for carried. The rest of the miscues were omissions and had one insertion. He is a careful and methodical reader which slows his speed. He was also bored by the text. He had about four yawns which lasted about five seconds each which took away from his speed leading him into a lower and perhaps inaccurate percentile range.  Outside of an assessment forum, it is my belief that a prior discussion about the reading would further engage the student and lead him to a different outcome with the assessment.  However, as a baseline, the information gathered is useful.

Fluency (rate and phrasing)

Based on the reading Amelia Earhart, the student began the reading with a slower pace and sped up almost double the speed following the first paragraph.  His reading speed is 79 words per minute according to the recording. For fourth grade, this is below average resting in the 10% category (Hasbrouck and Tindal, 2006). The assessment is not accurate because the student sped up with his reading after the second paragraph where he is at 85 words per minute which puts him two words away from the 25% mark.  As the student progresses, he reads faster and faster as he becomes familiar with the text and the story.  

Comprehension (content and strategies)

According to the retelling score sheet, the student achieved most of the points under the goal.  The reader knew this was during WWI and what her goals were and that she wanted to fly across the ocean and not as a passenger. As far as events, he retold four of them (1932, to be a pilot he flew, Earhart faced dangers). He retold almost half of the resolutions (Her plane disappeared; Earhart’s plane was never found (Foreman 1983). Out of the 47 ideas, the total number recalled was 15.  On level 4 comprehension (Pearson, 2006), the student 2 implicit questions correct and 0 explicit questions correct. He did not wish to do any look backs as he was not interested in the story. This affected his comprehension.  The reader was very focused on the plane crashing, ending up in the middle of the ocean and Amelia not being able to swim back to land due to the oceans vastness and temperature. He also deducted that the plane would be hard to find because like the Titanic, it might become covered with sand with the ocean shifting the sand around. He used previous knowledge and the movies he has seen to deduct some of the challenges relevant to the story.  When asked how long it took to fly the plane across the ocean, the student responded with four years. I believe he remembered the number 4 however, did not have a concept for the time it takes to get across an ocean or did not spend time thinking about it having been on the spot. He also remembered the years stated of 1928-1932 at the beginning of the story and equated that with the time it took to make the final trip.

Vocabulary:

Because the student is methodical and careful, he did not miss any vocabulary. He did use vocabulary from text for the retelling such as, disappeared, WWI, never found, danger, specific dates (1928-1932), she flew passenger and ocean. He understood all of the terms used within the text and there were not words he could not pronounce.

Ownership including enjoyment:

I do not think the student enjoyed the story about Amelia Earhart a he had no previous knowledge. He was however particularly interested in the disappearance plane as he had seen the movie Titanic. Previous knowledge of Amelia’s story would have boosted his engagment and comprehension as he is interested in adventure and treasure hunts. I believe he will be more interested in the railroad text as boys can usually relate to trains and are exposed to trains at a very young age. It will be interesting to compare the two assessments and gain further information on ownership and enjoyment. Also, if the story were about a male pilot rather than a female pilot, the student might have been able to relate further enhancing his enjoyment of the story.

As a result of this knowledge:

As a result to the above findings, finding an interesting text is paramount to assessing this student’s comprehension of text.  I would focus on him not omitting words although the words he omits is not key to understanding the text. I would also steer him toward reading for ideas that make sense. For example, it would not make sense for a trip over the ocean in a plan to take four years. I would encourage him to use common sense and his own reasoning to make sense of text he is unsure about. I would. Against the data, I do not believe the text is above his reading level. It just was not interesting to him. This student loses focus easily and needs more than anything for the text to be engaging and of interest to him. He also needs to be confident in his ability to read and not worry about being judged. We are there to support him, not judge him and he needs to know this.