Assessment and Evaluation of Reading
Background Information
Kathryn, age 6, is a first grader at Hedrick Elementary School in Lewisville, Texas. She lives with her mother, father, older sister, and older brother. According to her mother, Kathryn’s teacher reprimands her for poor writing habits and I wanted to assess her myself to see if there were actually some concerns. From the beginning, I knew Kathryn enjoyed reading and I was curious to see where she was with comprehension and reading accuracy. Whenever Kathryn is not allowed to go outside and play with her friends, she chooses to read. I found this information extremely encouraging for a child of her age.
Even though I knew Kathryn did not struggle much with her reading, I chose to tutor her because she was child that I was familiar with. I believe that every child can find improvements in their reading. I knew Kathryn would be eager to help me and at the same time respect me and my authority throughout the sessions. Also, I have a positive relationship with Kathryn’s mother, and I knew that she would help me in encouraging Kathryn and take any information I gave her into consideration to better Kathryn’s education.
Summary of Sessions
At the beginning of the tutoring sessions, I was unsure of my exact goals. I knew that I wanted to help Kathryn become a better reader, even if she was already ahead of or behind her own grade level. Through many assessments, I determined that Kathryn is at least at a middle of second grade reading level or perhaps a beginning of third grade level. She can comprehend and read words accurately with certain texts at a few grades higher than her own first grade level. However, on average, Kathryn can read extremely comfortably at second grade narrative texts.
Kathryn enjoyed most of the activities, but I learned from her that her favorite was the word sorting. Word sorting does not deal with writing, and because I made it a game, she was attentive during the activity. I noticed Kathryn was hesitant when dealing with writing and to keep her interested in learning; I focused on her strengths and interests. The only time Kathryn was fidgety was during writing activities and ready expository texts. I discussed the concerns with writing to Kathryn’s mother and the information she provided me lead me to believe that Kathryn’s teacher constantly criticizes her. The teacher complains about her writing as being too slow and too sloppy; I agree with her writing being too slow, however, Kathryn wrote especially neatly for me. To work around Kathryn’s thoughts and worries about writing, I reassured her that as long as she did her best, she would be fine. Also, it was helpful when she found out that I would not be grading her whatsoever on her handwriting. To my surprise, her writing did not look horrible for her being a first grader.
After a few sessions, my goal became to make Kathryn a better reader by working on her comprehension skills. She surprised me with how well she read, but when asking comprehension questions, I constantly had to prompt her. This concerned me at first, but after discussing my sessions with others, I found out that prompting was common with first graders. They have difficulty organizing the information they read as a retelling. This turned my focus to teaching Kathryn how to organize the information in her head so she can recall the information when asked to do so.
Assessments Administered
Myself as a Reader and Learner
Slosson Oral Reading Test
Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation
Phonic-Basic Literacy Test-#1-9: Phonics Skills Test
Morrison-McCall Spelling Scale
Elementary Qualitative Spelling Inventory
Sight Word Knowledge
Informal Writing Analysis
Flynt & Cooter Reading Inventory for the Classroom
Myself as a Reader and Learner
This assessment is used to determine the individual’s strengths and weaknesses and how he/she perceives them. When this was administered to Kathryn, I was able to find out that she enjoys reading. Her interest is in animals and therefore she would prefer to read an informational test about animals or insects. She only finds reading difficult when she gets to a word that is really hard to her; however, she does not give up. In later sessions, I was able to see Kathryn’s determination in decoding difficult words. No matter how difficult it was, she tried her best to decode the word because she was confident that she would get it right.
Slosson Oral Reading Test
The Slosson Oral Reading Test measures how well an individual can recognize words at increasingly higher levels of difficulty. This measure can be used to obtain an approximate reading level for an individual. To start this activity, Kathryn was asked to read aloud the primer list first and she was able to continue reading until the third grade level. When she got to the third grade level, she started having difficultly recognizing a large amount of the words. After calculating Kathryn’s score, she was at the 3rd grade, 5 months reading level.
Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation
This assessment was used to find out how well Kathryn achieves phonemic awareness and where she might need work. At the first grade, it is important for students to have good phonemic awareness. Out of the 22 words, Kathryn on had trouble with 1 word. I believe this was due to her going too fast and not stopping to think about the word. The word she missed was ‘grew’ and at the end of the assessment, I went back to that word and discussed with her how she said it and showed her the correct way. Kathryn appears to be fully phonemically aware.
Phonic-Basic Literacy Test-#1-9: Phonics Skills Test
The Phonic-Basic Literacy Test-#1-9: Phonics Skills Test is used to determine how an individual uses phonics to pronounce words. The words on this skills assessment are not all familiar words and the individual has to use his/her knowledge oh phonics to pronounce the words correctly. Kathryn did fine with the rhyming words and sounding-out words. I believe the speed Kathryn prefers to use gets in the way of her production. I often have to tell her to slow down, but during this assessment, I did not ask her to repeat a word because I needed to know where she was struggling. Kathryn struggled with how to pronounce some words such as: ‘pal’, ‘rof’, and ‘sob’. She pronounced those words like ‘pail, ‘roof’, and ‘soup’. She mixed up ‘mate’ with ‘mat’, but later on in the assessment said ‘plate’ for ‘plat’. Kathryn needs to lean when and how vowels are short and when they are long.
Morrison-McCall Spelling Scale
The Morrison-McCall Spelling Scale measures how well an individual can spell given words at increasingly higher grade levels. For this activity, Kathryn was asked to write out the spellings for words that I read aloud. Each word was accompanied by a sentence using the given word. After Kathryn misspelled 5 consecutive words, I then totaled the number of words Kathryn spelled correctly. Kathryn hesitated with this because she was worried that it would be too hard for her. Upon completion of the scoring of this assessment, I determined that Kathryn, according to the G-Score, is at the 2.4 level (2nd grade, 4th month).
Elementary Qualitative Spelling Inventory
The Elementary Qualitative Spelling Inventory aids in indicating at which developmental spelling stage an individual is performing. For this subtest, Kathryn was asked to spell specific words by writing them out and then stopping after three words were spelled incorrectly. Kathryn could spell all of the words at the late emergent-letter name-alphabetic stage. When she got to words representing the Within Word Patterns stage, she struggled with –oa and –ai in the words ‘float’ and ‘train’.
Sight Word Knowledge
This assessment was used to determine if Kathryn knew common sight words. I needed to know id she could instantly recognize them. Kathryn knew all of the first 100 sight words and out of the second set, numbers 101-200, she knew 99 words. Out of all 200 words, Kathryn only missed one word, she pronounced ‘know’ as your should pronounce ’now’.
Informal Writing Analysis
Kathryn was asked to complete a writing sample in order to evidence his strengths and weaknesses in written expression. For this activity, Kathryn was given three different picture prompts for writing, from which she chose one. Then, she was asked to write text to accompany the selected picture. Kathryn was given 15 minutes for this writing task.
After 10 minutes of writing, Kathryn produced one paragraph, telling a story about a girl on the beach with a water gun. The simple story that Kathryn had written showed good structure and sequencing. She had a beginning, middle, and a conclusion. Her handwriting was legible enough to read. Towards the end of the story, her lines on the page started to slant. At first, it seemed to be that she did not know she could finish a thought in the next line, but after reading her first two lines, that was not the case. It turned out that she was tired of writing and she stopped trying hard to stay in the lines and use good handwriting techniques. Kathryn seemed to have a good sense of story writing for her age and grade level.
Flynt & Cooter Reading Inventory for the Classroom
This reading inventory was administered to measure Kathryn's ability to read and comprehend both narrative and expository passages and also indicates in which reading grade level Kathryn is considered independent, instructional, or frustrational:
1. Independent - Student can read successfully without assistance.
2. Instructional - Student can read with assistance from a teacher.
3. Frustration - Student is unable to read with adequate word
identification or comprehension.
During this activity, Kathryn was first asked to read a given graded passage silently; then, she was asked to retell the story that she had just read. She was also asked related comprehension questions targeting details, vocabulary, inferences, summarizing, and main idea. After the comprehension questions were asked and answered, Kathryn was told to read the same passage aloud so that oral reading rate and accuracy could be assessed. This sequence of events was followed for each graded reading passage that was presented to Kathryn. The reading score from the Slosson Oral Reading Test was used to determine the starting grade level of the reading passages from the Flynt and Cooter Reading Inventory for the Classroom. In this case, I with a 2nd grade level reading passage.
Kathryn’s results with narrative and expository passages:
Narrative Reading Passages
Grade: 1 / Grade: 2 / Grade: 3 / Grade: 4Reading
Comprehension / 86% (Independent) / 80% (Independent) / 100% (Independent) / 50%
(Frustrational)
Reading
Accuracy / 95% (Independent) / 98% (Independent) / 98% (Independent) / 95%
(Independent)
Oral Reading Rate
(words per minute = wpm) / 79 wpm / 85 wpm / 75 wpm / 66.7 wpm
Expository Reading Passages
Grade: 2 / Grade: 3Reading
Comprehension / 62%
(Instructional) / 87%
(Independent)
Reading
Accuracy / 97%
(Independent) / 99% (Instructional)
Oral Reading Rate
(words per minute = wpm) / 66.7 wpm / 54 wpm
The information in the chats above show that Kathryn’s rate of reading is good for her grade level. For Kathryn’s age, the average rate is 80 wpm and as she read passages at her grade level and a few above, she was reading close to average. The possible reason for Kathryn’s slow pace with the expository text is because the passages did not flow like a narrative. Kathryn like some expository texts, especially those about animals and insects. That information helps me to understand why Kathryn scored at an independent comprehension level for the 3rd grade test, but she was at an instructional level with the 2nd grade text. The 3rd grade text was about butterflies and the 2nd grade text was about stars. She tends to comprehend expository texts better if they are over topic she enjoys.
Kathryn read aloud all of the passages and her reading accuracy rate ranged between 94%-98%. Her comprehension of the passages was not altered by her mistakes. Along with an assessment of reading accuracy and reading rate a miscue analysis was completed. This analysis was used to determine what types of errors, if any, Kathryn makes when reading aloud. In some of the passages, Kathryn omitted words or substituted words. She self-corrected most of her mistakes. Kathryn would substitute ‘the’ for ‘a’ and vice versa. With the 4th grade narrative text, Kathryn repeated many words and inserted ‘I’ after the text read “Chris, said.” She was ready for the story to say ‘I’ although the actual text did not. It would appear that the repeating of the text did hinder Kathryn’s comprehension because she only correctly answered 50% of the comprehension questions.
The types of questions Kathryn missed with expository text dealt with causation, collection, and evaluative. With the narrative passages, Kathryn was unsuccessful with some inferential and evaluative questions. Kathryn tends to answer questions correctly if they are text-based and factual questions. She has trouble with inferencing and picking out the theme of the text.
Overall, Kathryn is at an independent level at the 3rd grade with narrative texts. She starts to struggle as she gets to expository texts at the 2nd grade and above levels. At this time, Kathryn is reading narrative text comfortably and now she needs to work on expository text. As she gets older and moves up in school, she will be to be able to know how to comprehend expository text easier and more accurately.
Conclusion
In order to summarize all of the data that was collected on Kathryn for reading and writing, the findings are presented in the following categories: